Today is September twelfth. It strikes me for some reason that yesterday was September eleventh and today is September twelfth. This must be how they felt the day after 9/11. Like wait, time keeps going? The day keeps changing? I wonder if that will ever not be surprising to me.
I feel like my brain is somehow moving slower in the last few days. Not sure what to make of that. I’m able to navigate the world in the same way as I usually do, but in my own mind I’m feeling a little slower.
I saw my first circumcision today, and I feel like the events were philosophically meaningful. My job was to provide distraction. I dipped a disposable binky in sugar water and put it in the baby’s mouth. He sucked on it dutifully. What’s interesting is that he became less interested in it, or seemed to, after it had been in his mouth for a while. I noticed that he became a little more interested in it when I pulled it out just a little. I think he liked having to work for it a little. Being a little withholding made him want it more.
It made me wonder if that might be the case after this year is over. Assuming that the sugar water binky was a good and desirable thing, it seemed that the separation from it made the heart grow fonder. Is that going to happen to me with school? Or with medicine in general?
Is the sugar water what I want? Is it just distracting me from the fact that a stranger is mutilating my dick, and my parents have fled the scene to grab coffee? The stranger counsels my parents by saying, “you’re going to have so many beautiful moments with the baby; this doesn’t have to be one of them.” It feels extremely wicked and shockingly vile. I hate that it’s a custom in our culture, and I hate that I was a willing participant in the torment. However, I also recognized that the procedure would’ve taken place with or without me, and that there was a role I could play in which I could alleviate some of the suffering.
At the end of the day, medicine feels like a shitty intervention for problems people have. Do I really want to be prescribing kids SSRIs and cutting off babies' dicks?