With just over three days left in the calendar year, I caught up with Joe, an old friend from my post-bacc. It had been about four months since we last hung out, but with the way life has been going, it might as well have been ages. “How’s it been?” he asked.
I said, “Well…I’m still standing.”
Finishing up M1 year wasn’t too bad. If you asked me then, I would say that it wasn’t easy, but everything’s relative, of course. In this case, relative to our first block of M2 year, the first time my school was doing a block/systems organization for M2 year, M1 year was a cakewalk. Slogging through that first M2 block was like having to partake from a fire hose dispensing not water but pancakes at high pressure, which you might attempt bravely to eat but all that happens is you end up as the battered, worn-down survivor of flapjack-force trauma and maybe, hopefully, you ate enough to pass the exams.
With no time to recover between blocks, with stressed-out friends all around, the rest of the semester was spent treading water (or is it pancakes), not really being able to focus on anything but the immediate (and not even doing a good job at that). In the face of the ramped-up stressfest that M2 year was proving to be, maintaining my usual outward composure was coming at a high internal cost when I already had little emotional reserve to spare. I tried to remember how I handled things the last time I felt this way. I thought of Scott. I thought of the price I was paying for this change in direction in my life, the seven years (minimum) I was giving up in order to retrain; the lost income, the down-prioritization of friends, of family, of love. The implications of changing careers felt quite different now that I was firmly on the other side of 30.
Over Thanksgiving break, I finished a couple of books I had begun to read before first year started.
“To go through medical training, you have to resign yourself to long periods of time when you will simply do an inadequate job with all the people who mean most to you.” –Perri Klass, A Not Entirely Benign Procedure
“Life is bigger than what the trajectory of our medical careers will allow. And just because medicine tries to consume our entire lives doesn’t mean we have to willingly hand them over.” –Michelle Au, This Won’t Hurt a Bit (and other white lies)
If I read those words before starting school, they wouldn’t resonate quite so palpably. Those other things–otherwise stated, the more important things in life, the things taking a back seat to school–are what makes this worthwhile, what makes it possible to dedicate oneself in turn to the service of others.
The end of the semester eventually came, and with it no failing grades and a temporary reprieve from school, but no real resolution, for the cycle would only start anew in due time–and it only gets worse. All I can say is that this is the new normal–and hopefully I figure out how to reclaim what’s important in my life from this all-consuming beast that is medicine.