xxxiii
prev.cont.It’s only 3:30 in the afternoon, but the sun is already starting to get swallowed up by the trees. We’re entering winter.
I was looking at the sky earlier, when the sun was at its highest point, and my mind kept repeating the word “boundless.” The sky is boundless. Infinite. I want to be infinite, too.
We’re not supposed to be bound by things like jobs and weird years. I’m not supposed to spend all my time thinking about how to impress my attending, how to score well on an exam, how to optimize my schedule to allow for the most “free” time, how to use the free time when it comes.
The sky speaks a different language entirely. It’s too liberated to understand my neuroses. There’s no supervisor in the sky telling the clouds to reschedule an ob/gyn clinic that they missed. If there were, I’m sure the clouds would tell him to fuck off.
Today was my last day in the OR. Words can’t describe the feeling of relief.
I hated it in there. Hated. It feels good to be able to talk about it in the past tense. The way it makes my body feel (stiff and achy from hunching over an unconscious person), the thoughts it plants in my mind (I’m always in someone’s way, one wrong move could kill the unconscious person), the conversations to pass the time (monologues about the surgeon's fancy vacation in Spain). I hated everything about it.
I walked out of the OR and pulled off my mask and hairnet, smiling politely at the doctors and nurses who walked by. Then I walked down the long, empty hallway to the locker room with my head in my hands, like the Scream painting, unable to process the fact that I would never have to walk that hallway again, never set foot in that baseement again, never scrub in, never feel the anticipatory dread, never be ridiculed for my ignorance. It was impossible to even comprehend.
As much as I’ve come to hate medicine, I agree with its basic premise: healing the sick is something that we, as a society, ought to do. My hatred comes from the fact that we’re doing a terrible job.
I think part of why we do a bad job is because the path laid out for us by the American healthcare system is fucked. Along the path, future-doctors get pissed on and humiliated in a million different ways, every day. When we get to the end of the path, we’re traumatized, and our behavior is warped so far beyond normal human behavior that we inadvertently recuse ourselves from society—the same society that we’re trying to heal—with our occupational psychosis.
How many weeks are left now? The countdown is getting old. Can it just end already? I’m not in it anymore. I’m checked out. Let’s get it over with.
I felt like my brain was turned off in neurology clinic yesterday. I was just starting to dissociate when the doctor asked me a question about seizures. I totally froze. Nonverbal in front of the patient. That's never happened to me before.
A while later, the doctor asked what I was going to specialize in. Someone asks me that almost every day, and I usually just say something like, “I’m still weighing my options!” I don’t know if it was the weird year’s impending expiration or his comment the other day about not being prepared for "this reality," but I felt compelled to be honest with him. I told him that I’m planning on jumping ship as soon as the weird year ends. He was intrigued by the idea, almost relieved.
The more we talked about it, the more I felt like we were both real humans. "It’s exciting," he said. I asked him if it was exciting in the way that a car crash is exciting, and he said no, not quite. "It’s exciting," he said, "because it feels right."
exit