Medical school has begun and I've already received my second taste of death (my first, being in the anatomy lab, which I will touch upon later). My grandfather, aptly named "Pop Pop", passed away on Saturday; he was the last of my living grandparents. Even a mere twelve days into medical school, I can already see how medical school will inevitably change me. I saw myself mentally traversing between sadness and analysis as I watched, in the hospital room, my dying grandfather. I was of course deeply saddened by my Pop Pop's death and perhaps it was even more difficult to watch him struggle to stay alive, than it was to see his skin change from peach to pearl and to witness the nurse and then the doctor come in, check for vital signs, and then shake their heads. It was scary, though, to catch myself chugging through conjectures and hypotheses of what the cause of death was, for moments, as if I had turned off the sadness and turned on the science. I use the phrase "taste of death" purposely above, because it stimulates the same response in a careful reader as my own oblivious thought processes stimulated in me: "Is that normal to think of death in that way? Is it inhuman, cold, unfeeling?"
My first "taste of death" was met with similar confusion. The notion of anatomy lab, of dissecting a once-living-moving-thinking-feeling person, was, as described by a classmate of mine, "Exciting and nerve racking." It is, in my humble opinion, the medical school rite of passage. We had a lecture on the history of dissection, tracing it back thousands of years, followed by a talk about the UMass body donation program. Smell of fear stunk up the room as we first year students all realized that we would be carving and cutting in less than 24 hours. I imagine that this will not be the last time when fear will have to be buried in the name of performance. However, after the first incision, the four of us in my anatomy group realized that it was in fact easier (physically and psychologically) than we had thought to cut through human flesh, muscle, and fascia. Barely a week later, anatomy lab is equally awe inspiring but far more mechanical. My fear, then, has transformed from what it was before out lab--"Will I be able to do it?"--to something new. I now fear that routine will take over and my mind will convince itself that cutting into someone is not a note-worthy event. One of the many lines that I will have to straddle will be between mechanical, unfeeling, stone-cold precision on the one hand and emotion on the other. Both are necessary for my sanity and my future profession, but they can be mutually exclusive.
So, medical school and my training has begun.
