| I Still Love this Profession Brian J. So, MD Ohio State University Department on Internal Medicine Wow, has xanga changed quite a bit since I last logged on. It took me 15 minutes to figure out how to post on my site. The layout is so strange. Anyways, I thought I was done with xanga seeing as how busy residency was keeping me, but I find myself missing it. I had to write this reflective essay for my residency program and after its completion, I thought it might be a good segway into entering back into the xanga world. When I found out earlier this month that I had to write a personal essay regarding, well, pretty much anything regarding my experience as a resident, I initially felt that my time might be better utilized doing something else. Isn’t that true of pretty much anyone? In the end, that left me with the daunting task of deciding what I should write about. The month went on, and I could not decide how I should approach this essay. That is, until I washed my car… It is one of the strangest things I find in the human experience, that sometimes the most random of thoughts have a way of invading the mind at the most unusual of times and circumstances. Perhaps I am guilty of this more than most, having never had the ability to enter the minds of others and seeing what their daily thoughts look like. During lunch, while studying, while writing essays such as this, and yes, even during attending rounds, sometimes the most random thoughts, completely unrelated, can enter the conscience. I am guilty of all of these things and was guilty of it again this past weekend, while I was washing the salt and grime off of my car. I don’t know how it began, or what triggered it, but a thought hit me, I still love medicine. The thought was clear, simple, and resounding. And as I was at the point of drying my car with a terry cloth towel, my mind began to race, thoughts led to other thoughts, and I realized as a consequence, I had my essay. Being a physician was a dream of mine from early on in life. Who knows why? Parental influence? Cultural influence? Mattel’s toy stethoscope a friend of the family bought me on my 6th birthday? The witnessing of my beloved grandmother’s passing? Likely, it was multifactorial and a contribution was made by each of these things. In the end, I was left to conclude, like many who enter the field, that being a physician was less like a career choice and more a calling. When one is asked to study the years that we do, persist the years that we do, and are subsequently rewarded by only a small fraction of us being allowed to enter this field, how could it be called anything other than a calling. In Las Vegas, such people would be called “chumps,” to take on such odds. Only something of a calling, and not just a simple want, preference, or desire, would give us the perseverance to trudge on in hopes that one day, we may call ourselves “doctors,” even when the odds are stacked in such disfavor. When one is selected to enter this field, the euphoria lasts a few weeks. Eventually, we all come to the point where we realize the journey and the fight has just begun. Reality starts to take root. Through our years in medical school, we watch as our friends from college and high school marry and start to raise a family. We watch our friends close their first mortgage while we ourselves are building a mortgage of educational debt, which may be comparable to the GNP of developing nations. We watch our friends live the dream that many of us in medicine share and are not yet living, and doubt starts to creep. Was this the right choice? Should I have gone into another field? We start to see the stages of bereavement within our own ranks. For some of us, doubt and disbelief grow into regret, and you are left with bitter doctors, as I have, in my short experience, already met. Others come to acceptance and conclude it is probably too late to change their career now; they are too far involved, too much in debt, to change course now. But then there is the handful that are fortunate enough to open their eyes and their hearts to what it is they are doing, and find themselves shocked that they are being paid for what they consider a career of privilege. I would like to count myself among the latter. The truth is, every morning I go to work, whether in clinic or on service, I don my coat on and I feel a sense of pride. Sometimes, I feel a deep urge to smile or laugh and have to fight to contain it, otherwise running the risk of having my peers think I’ve gone mad, laughing in the middle of the resident’s room. In that brief moment, I’m beside myself, and I fall in love with medicine all over again. Although many state that medicine is an eventual and inevitable process of desensitization to the sick, the dying, and the patient, I have yet to find these things to be true. In fact, I find the exact opposite to be true. That, as my training and years involved in the profession grow, and as my responsibilities increase, I find myself humbled all over again at what it is I am doing. Can I physically heal everyone I meet? Certainly not. Can I change the world? I think so. You can take all the “perks” out of the equation (i.e. income, prestige, and respect) and the balance still falls in your favor. If we take it as a given, that in this world, every person works, than what greater work is there than this. We make our living fighting to improve the health of those that have entrusted their physical bodies in our hands, which they only have one of. Who was the genius that thought of paying us for that? I admit that as physicians, often we are given the credit for increasing the human life expectancy over that past two centuries, for bringing vaccinations that have “eradicated” diseases from this world, and for being healers, but the truth is, have we ever considered that maybe it is us, the physician, that are the ones being healed. |
