another m&m

While my last M&M post was about losing life, this one is about saving it. Not so much in the bringing back a pulse kind of way, or even the complete eradication of pain, but in the way that good turns all else into sources of gratitude. This M&M is called medicine & music.

"Medical school" has too many syllables, but really, it's more accurate than "medicine," because that's where I am, and what saves me. School allows for things that medicine may not: a certain free flowing mode of learning, and complete freedom to observe. And the beginnings of anything carry a peculiar poignancy that makes you very aware of them in the moment. Working in the emergency department is humbling, as the best parts of medical school have been. Crammed in a small space are little clips of people and problems, and as a student you can appreciate that you are in the middle of it. At this point in our lives, the weight of things still correlates with how they heavy they feel. A man with vertigo finds it's due to a stroke--the dizzy you feel that should just go away cause it's just in your head, but it won't go away because it is in your head. A man whose nephew passed away at 21 from a heart attack waits as we track his chest pain with labs and tests, his eyes wet as he talks about living in the southeastern tip of a small island. A woman finds the hard back of a trauma board more painful than the floor she's been lying on for twelve hours after a fall that fractured her arm in two places. A man writhes with tremors from an overdose, who is so thin you can't help but feel he might be right that things are too much.

Medical school is also more apt than medicine, because with school comes the family of friends I've had here. Early into my first year, a time that coincided with personal difficulties, I realized how much better I function in a small community. And more importantly, how much this small group of people offered. In this past week, small acts of kindness respond to my need for them, without knowing the nature of why I needed them but not questioning why. Dinners out with honest conversation about silly things and things most important to me. Someone who makes me believe in trying for genuine good, regardless of stumbles. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar in hand, and a mini avocado cheesecake in my fridge. Complete, sincere, effortless, unconditional acceptance of my faults from someone too hard on himself; he takes my mess and throws back simplicity. Company at the gym and the library. Encouragement disguised as a rap, both funny and sweet, and a typed smile from someone who has never before given one. Each person offers things in their own way, and the parallel care in individual qualities is such love.

While these things often take me beyond myself, music lets me be. I've returned to sounds that I loved years ago (Flaming Lips: Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots), or to sounds from years back that I didn't listen to properly back then (Linkin Park & Jay-Z: Collision Course, and lots of Linkin Park in general). I'm as addicted as everyone to The XX, whose atmospheric beats have both flash and depth, and I don't think I've loved this hard since Bon Iver. Besides catching up to the distant past, I'm catching up on 2009 with the timeliness of The Antlers' Hospice, and the new Muse, which has different parts all that I love through & through. A splash of Beirut's strange ache (Realpeople), all of Sigur Ros & Phoenix piling up on me, and so on and so on and it's all so filling. It's why I love commutes, the walks and train rides and road trips, the time I can take for music and myself and it's hard to describe in any other way except to say that it saves me.

I was walking around New Haven a little past four in the afternoon today, while it was still light. New Haven isn't thought to be pretty, but sometimes it is. The sky was filled in with gray but the top halves of all the brown-gray buildings were made golden by a sun you would have to turn around to see, but you wouldn't because you wouldn't move your eyes from the unearthly glow. Looking up at one point one such building merged its frame with quietly sprawling branches also alight with a mysterious sun, and my breath was sharp as I drew it in.