the 3.0 GPA

Life is pretty short. And in the brevity and idiocy of youth, decisions are made which can have only the direst of consequences. Ideas and ideations that start with the most innocent of desires can have unrelenting and painful ends.

In my younger years I spent hours reading a medical encyclopedia at my grandparents’ house. I learned about heart disease, hives, sexually transmitted diseases and types of bone breaks. Later on, I suffered an epileptic seizure which turned me into a patient. I had a spinal tap. I had to take two EEG tests, complete with a glucose cocktail both times to rule out diabetes. I had to stay up all night before both EEGs to make sure I’d sleep for the test. Later on, I was prescribed phenobarbital for two years and I had to see a psychiatrist.

I seemed to drop my interest in medicine throughout middle and high school, except that I took a chemistry class with a teacher who had invented a fuel for military rockets. Otherwise, I simply tried to survive in high school The only other class which piqued my interest was my psychology class, which was taught by my wrestling coach. He showed us a movie on lobotomies, and it was only much later that I learned the dire truth about this most barbaric practice.

In 1986, I started college as a psychology major, and I really enjoyed the coursework. We went well past the Pavlovian experience with responses, conditioned and unconditioned, and went full force into such topics as statistics, personality testing and finally abnormal psychology.

One day in October 1987, the professor for the abnormal psychology class stated in an almost nonchalant fashion that psychologists couldn’t “touch” the patients. They could neither prescribe pharmaceuticals nor do medical procedures.

I had been anxiously wondering about what I would do with a psychology degree, especially since I was taking a zoology class at my college’s science building. In zoology, we dissected a newt and a frog and then moved onto rats. I was fascinated by the mammalian body, and it all seemed so hands-on and straightforward. It was then that I remembered my perusals into those medical encyclopedias and my seizure. I also was doing well in school for the first time in my life: I had eked out a 2.6 GPA in high school, but now that I was in college I’d gotten all the way above a 3.0!

I began to feel like I was above the psych classes I was taking. It all seemed so nebulous. I couldn’t use drugs. I changed my major to pre-med. It was a drastic change, and it meant that I’d be making a final foray into clinically oriented “hard” science.

I often think that if I’d stayed in psych, I’d have come across the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and I might have realized that as an INFP, it’s possible that the hard sciences just were not for me. But I was such a good “chameleon” at the time, and I switched my major.

I joined forces with a professor, remained at university for the summer of 1988 and engaged in research of the oxygen sensitivity of newts and bullfrog tadpoles at two different temperatures of water, because warm water caused by climate change carries less oxygen. I presented my findings and had my abstract published in a science periodical. One summer later I did an internship testing for the ocular sensitivity of different brands of shampoo using in-vitro methods. I was doing some research, but I lacked the clinical experience I should have been getting to determine for myself whether or not I’d be a good doctor.

I finally attempted this as a volunteer in a hospital, and it was an unmitigated disaster. I was attending to a patient, and he broke free of his straps and tried to force my head into his lap, and we were caught by a nurse. The nurse just happened to be the organist for my church; to say it was embarrassing was the severest of understatements. Finally, she called in strong orderlies, and they strapped the screaming patient down to his bed. I stayed for the rest of the shift, but I was traumatized by what I’d witnessed, and yet I kept very quiet about it.

I also didn’t like blood very much. Back at college after that summer I had to draw my own blood, put it on a microscope slide, add hydrogen peroxide, and view it under a light microscope. I lanceted my left index finger and squeezed out my drop onto the slide just fine, but somehow the act of dragging the cover slip across the blood and hydrogen peroxide mixture was too much for me, and I passed out. The next thing I remember, I was lying face up on the cold linoleum tiles of the microbiology lab. Two of my classmates were crouched down around me, one of them fanning me with her notebook. That was the first and last time I ever handled blood. 

A normal person might have put up the surrender flag, and switched back to psychology, but I soldiered on. I studied very hard during the summer of 1989 and did OK on the MCAT. I finally got into medical school a year later. But somehow. when I got there, I felt deflated at all the work that lay ahead of me.

There was one clinical experience at Roxborough Hospital in Philadelphia. A man had come in with blood clots in his left arm. He said he was married, but that his wife had left him, and “went back to Russia”. The attending doctor wore a lab coat with little sharks all over it. He commented on the nurses, and he said that they were “pigs on the weekend”, because they just happened to have snacks in the nurses’ station. That seemed kind of sexist to me. But I survived the shift.

I’d like to go on about my two years in medical school, and how I failed microbiology in my first year, and then failed several more classes in my second year. By the spring of 1993 I had given up, and by May I had been dismissed from school due to “multiple failures”. My minister said I was “kicking against the pricks”, yet he also convinced me not to run home to my parents; I found Philadelphia to be very affordable. Erm, not so much, due to the $50,000 I owed for my medical school student loans! But I stayed, got a job, and did my best to repay them.

Am I a hero? A tragic hero? Is my story a tragicomedy? Thirty-one years on, I still haven’t figured it out. But I met my wife that year, and she helped me to repay them. We became student loan debt free in 2012, and we had to sock away a lot of money per month to get it done.

I might be a hero to someone, but I’m not worried about it. Macbeth was a victim of his ambition, and I suppose to an extent I was as well. I’ve blamed my ambition on my upbringing in “New Amsterdam”, where tolerance and hard work are the norm for young white males. If I’d actually grown up in Philadelphia, I might have been more along the lines of the Quakers, who are self-deprecating. I might have tried another medically aligned profession, learned that it wasn’t for me, and moved on without any student loan debt. But I went full-tilt and I really botched things up for myself. I have to live with that.