Medical training is probably one of the worst things you can ever do to yourself. You'll wake up at 330am, feeling too tired to function, and thoughts racing in your mind about:
1. when you'll get to sleep again
2. what you can do to survive the 30+ hours straight in the hospital
3. how to be healthy and functional with all the bad, unhealthy food in the hospital
4. how you did on that past future-determining exam
5. whether or not you want to do fellowship and how it'll affect your relationship, future/present family, and income
6. how sickeningly in debt you are in from your undergraduate and medical education
7. how your patients did overnight, and whether or not the overnight guy did well
8. how your patients did during the day and whether or not the day guy did well
9. how well you complied with sometimes-arbitrary guidelines
10. if your attending hates you
11. if the nurses hate you
12. if your team thinks you're competent or not
13. whether you're becoming more efficient or not, because every day feels like drowning "lite"
Oh yea, and you wake up at 330 because you need to be at the hospital as early as hell and the patient census is terrifying and you can literally feel the strain the underfunded hospital system is feeling.
We party hard because there are so few opportunities to just let go. Medicine is harsh. You spend all of your junior time trying to prove to senior faculty and residents that you're just as good as they are, with many fewer years of experience under your belt. You get judged really hard, and your self-esteem more often than not ends up a little bruised.
People make your life hell based on how intelligent you are. Every time you start a new service you have to constantly display the knowledge people 10+ years your senior have, or you just get pimped a lot and made to do menial, non-educational tasks. It's hard. And this isn't even the patient interaction side of things.
We party a lot because we need to suppress the memories of dying patients that still haunt us. As a junior medical student, I've had to explain prognoses, tell people they're dying, all in front of their families who can't let go. I've struggled trying to convince family members that chemotherapy is of minimal benefit, and of high risk and morbidity in their 70+ year old stage 4 family member who can't even get up from a bed on their own.
Medicine is draining. If you go into medicine, get ready for the grind that it is, and choose a field that makes you happy. It'll be worth it.
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