The Premed

   I remember her name, first and last, but I can’t write it because that would be a violation of patient privacy. Of course, she wasn’t my patient, because I didn’t have my own patients yet, but a violation nonetheless. There is a chance I only remember her name because I went on two dates with her son – an awkward first date lunch at a diner during which I felt no spark whatsoever and at the end of which we split the bill and inexplicably then a second date comprised of watching Pan’s Labyrinth in his musty apartment which I should have fled as soon as I saw his circa-1998 JNCO jeans worn non-ironically. He's not the important one though.

    She stepped into the office to talk to the secretary like my boss’s other patients. I’m sure “secretary” wasn’t the politically correct term even then but the scheduler, a compulsive liar whose only volume was extremely loud, needed to differentiate herself and demean anyone she encountered, so she was the scheduler and the other kinder and more honest woman who shared our tiny office was the secretary. I assume the patient made a follow up appointment, but after that she must have noticed I was a new face in the corner and started chatting with me. Not knowing our conversation was about to change my life, I didn’t pay attention to the details of why she knew the previous research assistant and knew I was a new one (she must have had a previous surgery with my boss in the past? Because unlike my specialty, those surgeons don’t follow their patients forever). I said something to her about planning to apply to medical school but being unsure about the time commitment. In retrospect, I must have been very unsure indeed if I was mentioning it a minute into a conversation with a friendly stranger.

    She said, “Oh that’s wonderful. I took all of the classes in college and was going to apply to medical school, but then I met my husband, and then I had my sons, and it just never happened. I love them but I remember being in my early 30s and thinking, ‘huh, if I’d gone to medical school, I’d be a doctor right now.'” She paused for a few seconds. “You should do it. The time will pass anyway, but you could be a doctor at the end of it.”

    I’m sure – I hope – I said something polite before she pivoted from that sage advice to soliciting my personal email address to give to her son who was a very nice boy and happened to be the same age as me. Then I went back to work, line by line filling a color-coded Excel spreadsheet from information painstakingly extracted from patient charts. Looking back. the design of those spreadsheets was a rainbow array of the mechanisms of my mind, and telling everyone who asked that I was “thinking” about medical school instead of planning to be a doctor was my still-developing, insecure 22-year-old soul showing through the thin veneer of fake adulthood.

    I didn’t realize it, but her words had burrowed into a deep recess of my mind. “The time will pass anyway, but you could be a doctor at the end of it.” My boss, a wonderful mentor, had shared similar thoughts in conversations about the future and money and career satisfaction and the perils of comparing myself to my peer investment bankers making three times my salary who would be “burned out and miserable” in five years, and I think about his advice too, but when I think of one sentence to sum things up, it’s hers. You can’t pause in a euphoric moment and you can’t stay young forever. However you choose to spend your days, the years will keep passing. 

    On my resume, the years following that conversation are summarized by institutional names and graduation dates, research mentors and publications and co-authors in a shotgun blast of fields, and now professional society memberships and citations with my name at the end, as the senior author. It’s all tightly formatted in black and white. There’s an elegance in hundreds or thousands of hours represented so succinctly.

    In my brain, it was a blur. I can break it up into time periods, with memorable long drives for the cross-country moves in between. First, the rest of that research job which gave me a total of 2 years of 9-5 hours and not nearly enough money for the expensive, gigantic city I lived in, but also gave me the experience of being painfully young in the city in a way that can’t be replicated later in life. Next the years of medical school in a unique and colorful new part of the country, balancing simmering pressure and twelve-hour study days with the largest group of friends I’ve ever had and a place where every day there was music or a festival or someone’s boat or a bartender to flirt with or a lazy afternoon by the river or dinner with someone’s visiting friend from “home”. Technically at graduation I became a doctor, but I wasn’t here yet, not enough time had passed.

    There were bleak years of residency in a natural wonderland that I explored, finding energy I didn’t have to surf in icy waves, hike under Douglas firs, and ski on days I was so tired my face hurt. I could fall asleep at dinner mid-conversation or standing up with my gloved hand on a human heart. Fortunately, I only fell asleep driving once, and it was only for a millisecond in stopped highway traffic. Time and I developed a different relationship in those years. There were innumerable call nights when I repeated the adage “they can do anything they want to you, but they can’t stop the clock”, meaning that eventually no matter what happened in the middle of the night, the day team would show up at 6am and you would get to sign out and eventually go home. (“They” of course were the hospital gods, because we were all atheists, refusing to believe there was a divine order to the suffering we saw daily, but we were unreasonably superstitious atheists. They were the same reason we would never say “it’s been quiet so far” – the gods would smite us.)

    Some part of me, but definitely not all of me, got through residency to the year of fellowship in another new city with a core friend group and the sun and flashy wealth and sexual harassment. As if all of those years hadn’t been enough, there were two more cross-country drives toward and away from an incredibly frustrating first job during a pandemic. Then, finally, I arrived here.

    I’ve been asked what I would have done if I hadn’t gone into medicine, and I don’t have a good answer. I wouldn’t have done any other job in healthcare – it was physician or a completely different field. If I’m ever offered a chance to explore the multiverse of joining the Peace Corps school or moving to a less expensive city and trying to write full time instead of going to medical, I will take the opportunity in a heartbeat. In this present universe though, the time passed, and I’m a doctor at the end of it.