It’s reading week. I figured I’d try to catch up on 2 weeks worth of neglected neuro, but it’s hard to focus when there’s a cliff around the corner and an epiphany in my rearview.
I’ll explain what that means.
3rd year is creeping up faster than I expected; electives, tracks, getting ”P-I-M-P-ed” and the whole shabang. It’s time to decide what I really want to do for the rest of my life. And that’s not even the hard part …fighting to get there will be. Like those couple of months before May 15, I think I’m approaching another junction in life that involves putting as much unmitigated, naive ambition as possible into a small, unforgiving metal cage, and watching it swirl viciously around on itself, biting and clawing tooth and nail, until some parties, unfortunately enough, perish under the pressure…unmatched so to speak. Ugh.
Truthfully, it’s probably not going to be that bad. Not like undergrad. Or the Olympics (haha, they’re on TV right now, broadcasting from Vancouver!, if you’re wondering about the awkward allusion …another source of distraction from neurology). Still, the whole idea of having to strategize that hard again, just to assure oneself of a non-ambiguous future, makes it feel like Darwin doesn’t let up. Ever. (There’s an R4 match in medicine too..fantastic).
How to do what elective when, how to look good in front of program directors, how to behave at learning-time vs. audition-time, how to book at more than one site so you can guarantee yourself multiple interviews when CaRMS rolls around, how diversify your experience enough to seem well trained in all medicine but also dedicate the impossible 6weeks to ’holy grail’-ing …yadda yadda yadda
Too many strategies, too little brain space, almost no time. – That’s the cliff around my corner.
I guess it would help if I had a starting point and actually knew what ‘grail’ of a specialty I was chasing. Stupidly though, I have no idea. They always say you can at least pick between surgical and medical in your first two years…something about this inherent ‘dichotomy’ in any group of med students. Seriously? Maybe this means I’m actually Palestinian-Israeli (sorry, should watch the PC here, I just couldn’t find any other flagrant, contradictory analogies for my surg and med inclinations).
In all seriousness, I really don’t know what I’m going to do. I told EZ the other day, when I was walking with him to the bus stop, that every field has its ‘bread and butter’ and I’m not sure I want to eat carbs for the rest of my life.
His response (apart from ‘you should do anaesthesia – hands of a surgeon, mind of an internist… paid per hour to do sudoku…pretty sweet’) was that I should figure out who I am and go from there…ie the whole ”what fits best with your personality”-argument. It’s a good point, and I have given it thought, especially over the summer. I just never come up with useful, definitive conclusions.
To hazard at lame cliches, I feel like I don’t know who I am.
That was the epiphany I mentioned earlier. Lame, I know. So lame. But it’s true.. we went on a ski trip to Sunshine/LL and I spent a lot of time with the usual group. The only thing different was that a couple of non-PC jokes (Asian vs. Canadian athletes in the Olympics) came up over hot chocolate by the TV. Normally, I’m the one cracking the jokes, and I don’t mind, but since that pre-Christmas blunder at Avenue over discussions of MJ, I’m more than hesitant in my interpretation of ‘joking’. Maybe that’s why I’ve never melded completely with the group? Inherently, I’m different… not just the skintone or eyes (haha, I’m not turning this ‘who am I and what kind of doctor should I become?’ into a totally unrelated discourse on racial identity a la Asian North American Literature no, I just mean that I don’t have the same commonality of experience as most people who surround me …and as a consequence, I don’t really know how to put a finger on my ‘personality’?…hard to explain).
Think of it this way, in terms of the games you used to play as a child. To a certain degree (ugh, getting all philosophical, sorry), the games define your culture of ‘growing up’, who you are, your paradigm and personality. They probably unwittingly define what types of people you gravitate toward and what activities/positions/responsibilities you’re most content with later in life (ugh, desperately trying to draw some med-career-relevance from this disjointed ramble). So childhood games…what kind of person am I, and will I like prescribing more than cutting?
Well, I’m not the small-town kid who raced to the hockey rink every Saturday morning, went camping with my family in the summertime, sped around on a skidoo in the winter, hiked or fished a lot, drank tons of beer when I first got into university, rode in the back of my dad’s pickup, or ran around the park with my huge golden retriever…etc
I’m also not the kid who lived in the white mansion with regal black roof at the top of the hill (sorry, looking at too many facebook pictures of SP’s Harvard friends.. makes me a little queasy to be honest). I never wore pastel polos and overpriced childrens’ khakis, rode family horses, ate meals prepared by a live-in chef, spent summers in the hamptons, or subconciously looked down at poor, ethnic kids and addressed them as “they“. I never played with golf clubs, antique porcelaind dolls, or stocks.
I’m definitely not the chirpy, happy, eternally-overly-optimistic, glasses-wearing, church-fellowship-going, studies-4-months-before-any-major-exam Asian crew (yes, ironic *see above about racial identity). My parents also failed to beat me into a piano prodigy, chess champ, badminton star, or 21-year-old physics PhD.
So what am I? Where’s my personality? And what career should I pick accordingly? Perhaps there’s some specialty out there perfect for the indecisive, confused, and lonely. Those kids used to play with popsicle sticks, chopsticks, bake-able Fimo, and elastic bands, trying to construct a makeshift lollipop spinner like the electric ones at Walmart, which their mom wouldn’t buy because it seemed like a waste of hard-earned post-doc salary. When the spinner failed, those kids resorted to building tiny bird-nest models with toothpicks and cotton balls. There must be a field/residency that corresponds to this category of childhood game. A specialty both thoughtful and practical; cerebral and sort-of hands-on. Something few can understand or master, because all the doctors practicing it refuse to fit properly into a predefined group.
Shit. I just described pathology.
No comments:
Post a Comment