Talking to a friend of a friend the other day, or rather was being plied by him for answers about what it was like to be a doctor.
Listening to him tell me he wants to make a difference, and help where he can, when he can puts me in mind of a different time and place...
I was him once, all earnesty and bright eyed, waggy-tailed sincerity. An army of old men telling me to be prepared - do you really really want this; you must really want this, because the sky's the limit but the sky has a low ceiling... a legion of old men couldn't dampen my hopes.
A panel of four interviewers listening intently while I tell them just Why; tell them about how my father (whom I love a great deal but just can't bring myself to show it - it's just how I was raised and who I am now) treated my grandmother in her last days as she succumbed slowly and painfully to the ravages of hepatocellular carcinoma; watching his stoic silence as he put up her morphine, watching how he made the long trek across the island every day to be there with her after work... watching as the life drained out of both of them day by day made me realise I wanted to be like him; I wanted to be Good. Perhaps it showed in my eyes as I babbled incoherently, who knows : but the interview panels wanted me. And I wanted them, because they didn't throw me tired, bitter lines like "Why Do you Want to be a Doctor aside from Saving lives and All that Crap"... but simply wanted to know about me, and why I wanted what I did, as much as I did.
Cut back to present day, and I'm telling him : this fuzzy feeling you have right now isn't enough; it will melt away - it's inevitable. We can't be that person all the time, and as time passes you'll be that person less and less. You need something more... you just have to really, really want this; i'm mindful how I was told the same thing once upon a lifetime ago, and I thought secretly, but I'm not like you, I'll be different... and I secretly pitied the doctor on the other side of the conversation intimating that he was burning out; I'm not like you, I won't falter... I know I really, really want this.
And I realise how futile it all is; or perhaps I'm just choosing the words wrong.
So for those of you hopeful bunnies for whom its not too late, and for the rest who I would like to share this with - S, I wish I could have told you this since you told me what being a vet was like, and Agent J, who's busy saving the world right now and loves me enough to feel outraged on my behalf...
Being a doctor is getting that phone call after 3 gruelling hours of medical statistics made Hard (ie taught all wrong) and racing back to hospital at ten pm to fly into OT. Not because you want to impress the boss, or even because of a sense of duty to help him out while he vanquishes the monster, nor even because you owe it to this poor patient whose liver just keeps packing up post liver transplant, but because you need to know what went wrong, and you need to learn how to fix it; because you need to be there, for no particular reason. You just do.
Being a doctor is scrubbing out at one am, and gazing glassy eyed at the desolate, deserted road stretching out before you.
Getting home and eating cold carbonara out of the fridge because you're so damn hungry you can't wait the two minutes it takes to nuke it back to life. And marvelling at how divine it tastes - cream is such a wonderful, wonderful thing!
Dropping your clothes in a trail behind you like Hansel and Gretal did (well, perhaps those were tidbits and not clothes, but clothes would make for a more exciting story, no?) as you meander towards the toilet (say hello, late-night cockroach) to wash the sebum off your face and out of your eyes.
Flopping into bed and picking up that biostats book because time is short, and tomorrow is another day - and thinking Thank God this is me having an Easy Time, imagine if I was full-time right now.
And yet feeling - yes, this is what I want. It sucks ass, and some of my friends are being paid triple my salary and don't have to fork out thousands of dollars for radiation protection wear. For high powered operating binocular spectacles. For all sorts of things the government will shriek at when I try to claim it from them.
And said friends are working maybe half the total number of hours I am each week.
But it doesn't matter, because this is... me.
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4 comments:
Yes, you with lots of lead lined protective gear please - do they make lead lined underwear too? (before all that radiation causes some irreversible mutation resulting in you actually having a waggly tail...)
Still am outraged though! You could have been here watching summer segue Into fall with me if you were in any other profession :( bah humbug... Anyway it's mission accomplished here and off to Paris tomorrow to save the world economy one handbag at a time!
One should tell the bright-eyed wannabes that one day in the future, priorities will shift; that when you start a family, work is no longer everything, and you will resent the nature of the job that repeatedly compels you to leave your loved ones behind at home; that you do this years on end, and one day if you continue to let it spin out of your control, you will risk waking up at the age of 50 wondering why the hell you hadn't chosen to do things differently.
They need to know, that if they want to go down this route, they have to be prepared to fight for a balanced life. If they do not even understand what this means, then don't do it.
today someone had a sudden post-op bleed, so we spent 4 hours in theatre and instead of going home at 10am i left hospital at 230.
if i had known this last time, i probably would've still done medicine, thinking that it was noble, and that i wanted to save the world and all that jazz.
i guess that what i'm saying is that we were stupid, we are stupid, and we will continue to be stupid.
because we care.
kind of.
Thanks for the insight. Was thinking of pursuing medicine, but now I'm really questioning whether the desire to help others alone is really enough. I guess in the long-term, it is not. And the post helped to present a side of reality that most don't usually know about.
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