Change and Goals

My life is slowly being self-refined to improve efficiency and output. I suppose anyone who realizes that time is limited while ambitions are boundless needs to make the choice to section life down to the essentials, whatever those may be. I'm still trying to figure out what my essentials, my essence, is. Strangely enough, time doesn't really factor into some kinds of mastery. I find it ironic that, since medicine is both and art and a science, there are aspects of this field that counter every pre-medical, hardworking, stay-up-until-four-in-the-morning-to-cram-for-the-test instinct that I've cultivated over the years. Building relationships comes not from hard work, although can be a prerequisite; relating to people does not follow a straight, predictable path. Finding a connection with someone is not like learning information, where clearly the more time that you spend studying, the better you will know the material. No, connecting to people is like Zen Buddhism (from my limited understanding of it) whereby you Do By Not Doing and Progress Forward By Moving Sideways. In fact, sometimes ambitious effort is retroactive. This is obvious to most, but what it means is that my learning here is split between working to synthesize information, connect concepts, and comprehend the scientific face of medicine, while at the same time, understanding how to be a professional in the face of sickness, sorrow, or sometimes simply check-ups. It is developing dueling and quite different skills and layering on top of these my own person, my own preferences, style, and...essence.

Skills for Life

I continue to intimidate myself with the understanding that what I am learning here and now will become the foundation of my life's work. While my experiences, lessons, thoughts, memories, moments, successes, and failures which have formed me into what I am and how I think were by no means for naught, there is a sense of eternity that this new information has. I feel as though I am shaping future career as a physician and so each time I sit down to study there is an added sense of urgency to remember every morsel of biochemistry, genetics, and anatomy which presents itself; it is the (perhaps false) feeling that everything now matters.

Then, this sense of eternity transforms into a reminder of my own mortality, to an understanding that if I put off fun and games now, that I will likely continue doing so until sometime in my 50s when I wake up only to realize that I've spent the past 30 years worrying about progressing professionally and I've neglected the simple important things in life and in doing so, lived a dry, monochromatic existence. Of course, these are two extremes, but it is difficult to how the road ahead will and more importantly, should traverse them.

We had our first biochemistry and our first anatomy exams, both of which were wake up calls and proved to be adequately challenging (that is a euphemism). They were good wake-up-calls to not only my own need to study, despite any level of innate intelligence I may or may not possess, but as well to the caliber of my peers and my predecessors: there are a lot of smart people in this profession. It was a reminder that excelling in this world ain't easy and that simply hard work and diligence are not even enough to succeed. It requires that certain je ne sais quoi which I have not found yet.

The Beginning

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.