Medical School

Bodies and too much thinking

I went to see bodies- The exhibition last week and was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. I went with kind of a crappy attitude because gross anatomy though 8 years ago still hasn’t gone into the part of my brain where I can “look back on it and laugh”.

My first thought was the pleasant realization that there was no smell of formalyn
and the dissections were immaculate. I’m talking perfect like the ones Dr Montgomery would do.( side note: Montgomery actually wrote the Appleton-Lange Board review for Anatomy- I knew that he knew his stuff but …Wow- Flashback to Montgomery kicking people out of his class for sleeping!)

Anyway-it was actually artistic. One “piece”(can I call it that??) was all of the nerves dissected out of a body and placed on a table!! It was amazing. Another was a skeleton facing and holding hands with a full anatomical set of muscles. That wasn’t mind blowing until you read that the muscles were actually from the same person. So dude was literally holding his own hands–eerie. Click the pic below for a google link to some of the exhibits.
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It’s hard to put into words what exactly I felt at the exhibit. I guess the whole time we were in first year we were to busy trying to learn everything to really step back and think about the fact that we were cutting real people. Then when we did I think that the typical response was to jump in with the macabre sense of humor that we used to cover the flood of emotions that most of us really didn’t want to face. To stand there surrounded by all of these bodies- with perfect incisions and watch other people’s reactions who hadn’t spent 6 hours a day for a year next to them was a real eye opener.

WARNING: Rant in three paragraphs!

Then I got really homesick. I haven’t treated a patient or worn a white coat since October 13,2003 and I know that when I’m back on the ward and living in my coat the nostalgia will quickly be jolted out of my memories but after 12 years of your life doing something it becomes a part of you. I believe it’s closely related to identification with the aggressor. As much as I love coding the fact that as long as anyone can remember I’ve been a pre-med and that I have spent most of my adult life around aspiring physicians means that my morbid sense of humor, my ability to eat a sandwich while pointing to parts inside a body and my interaction patterns overall make me feel ill at ease in most other situations.

So despite how irritating it had to be and my promise to myself to resist this temptation- before I left the exhibition I ended up answering more anatomy questions than I care top recall- I blame NT for going into medical student mode when the other two med students were standing around naming parts. And since I spent a summer as an anatomy lab teaching assistant and the forever in the medical pecking order I took the bait. In medicine the second you flex what you do know you better make damn sure someone in higher rank isn’t around to pimp you. Thus out came Dr.Saint-Victor. Funny thing is somewhere in my mind I kept waiting for an attending to come out of nowhere and hit me with a couple of Pathophysiology questions.

My point is that I felt more at home in that room full of bodies than I have felt in three years. One of the most idiotic phrases that I ever heard is “Going to find yourself”. At least I thought it was until I “found myself”. As a physician and even a pre-med -way way back at Harvard people tend to treat you a certain way. At first it’s neat, then it goes to your head, then you don’t realize the way you are because you are surrounded by a bunch of other sleep deprived souls who also have a weird vocabulary, always make medical jokes and essentially think the same. I couldn’t help but to wonder if as a young child I hadn’t chosen the path that I did how would my life be different. The say that you marry medicine and everything else comes second. That often includes your health, your family and anything else that you can think of. In order to find out I had to stop talking about it and take the dive. As a consequence of this I can spend every day of the rest of my life knowing that I am doing exactly what I was built to do- exactly where I fit in and not have a single regret.

My dream is to bring computers to medicine. I wanted to learn to program and have it be a part of who I am. I resented that it something on my to-do list that I would never have time to do. Soon I have to go back home- I have $200,000 worth of debt that I will never -ever…ever be able to pay of unless I’m doing some serious people-healing. It feels good to miss it though. It feels even better to know that when the opportunity comes to combine the two disciplines of Medicine and computers I will be prepared.

So now I have a new shelf to go next to the hundreds of Biology and chem books that I have been stacking all of my life. I also got to become a stronger person by hearing three years of everyone’s opinions of how I could not learn to program( I guess because I’m so terribly stupid and have always historically been a slow learner- right??yeah).

I got to hear how people really felt about me because after quietly waiting all of your life for you to make a misstep when people think you have actually fallen and won’t be able to recover they can’t help but to spring at the opportunity to tell you that you’re really not as smart as you like to believe you are and that you’re not going to amount to anything and that they knew all along that you wouldn’t make it and that you are too much of a dreamer.

Well- I am a dreamer- Unfortunately for the outspoken critics I’m a dreamer with an obsessive-compulsive like work streak. I look at all of them in the same way that I look at the people who would tell a freshamn in high school that it’s unrealistic to want to go to Harvard, that it takes too long to become a doctor and that it’s impossible to get into medical school and even harder to finish- Yes it was hard as hell. But not as hard as to live my life feeling as if I was not living up to my potential. I feel so at peace now that I couldn’t begin to explain it. I know exactly what I want to do with my life and see the clear path to do it. I can live everyday looking forward to my future and have finally gotten rid of the empty feeling that I always had inside where every time I acccomplished something I was disappointed at how it felt- I hated walking around in med school thinking “so this is it??” I hated wondering what my role and contribution would be in medicine -and was envious when I would see certain physicians working the longest of shifts with a burning passion. I’ll never forget what Rebecca–excuse me I mean Dr.Sands said to me during second year in med school. “It’s not hard work…it’s fun!”. I had a hard time understanding that- The same way that people look at me strange when I try to explain how programming relaxes me(when not working against a deadline).

I can’t help but to use the phrase…”I had to go find myself” It’s strange to understand what that means - I can’t explain it- Like my father used to say -”If I explained it to you then you wouldn’t learn from it. You have to find the answer for yourself”.

All that introspection from a trip to the bodies exhibit!

© 2006 diamondTearz.