1) You will lose all the friends you had before medicine.
You think I’m kidding here. No, I’m not: I mean it in the most literal sense possible. I have a friend in UCLA Med School who lives 12min away, and I’ve seen here once — in three years. I saw her more often when she lived in Boston and I was in LA, no foolin’.

Here’s the deal: you’ll be so caught up with taking classes, studying for exams, doing ward rotations, taking care of too many patients as a resident, trying to squeeze in a meal or an extra hour of sleep, that your entire life pre-medicine will be relegated to some nether, dust-gathering corner of your mind. Docs and med students don’t make it to their college reunions because who can take a whole weekend off? Unthinkable.

And so those old friends will simply drift away because of said temporal and physical restrictions and be replaced by your medical compadres, whom you have no choice but to see every day. Which brings us to…

2) You will have difficulty sustaining a relationship and will
probably break up with or divorce your current significant other during training.

For the same reasons enumerated above, you just won’t have time for quality time, kid. Any time you do have will be spent catching up on that microbiology lecture, cramming for the Boards, getting some sleep after overnight call and just doing the basic housekeeping of keeping a Homo medicus upright and functioning. When it’s a choice between having a meal/getting some actual sleep after being up for 36 hrs vs. spending quality time with your sig-o, which one wins, buddy? I know he/she’s great and all, but a relationship is a luxury that your pared-down, elemental,...