finding time

I’ve been struggling of late about my plans for the next year, or two years. Here we have the choice to graduate in four or five years. If we choose to take it, the “fifth” year happens between our third and fourth years, our clinical years. Because we are required to write a thesis on any sort of research related to medicine, many students take this year to complete the research. Others take a “flexible fifth year” wherein they do short-term research for a few months, something else for a few months, back to research for awhile, and so on. That “something else” is quite diverse; we can take electives here or abroad, or something completely unrelated to medicine altogether. You can also take the year and not do research at all. Some people get their MBA or MPH, or they take undergraduate courses on literature.

As I’ve already completed the research required for my thesis, I could graduate in the standard four years, which is what I’d always planned on doing. But somewhere during third year, I found the idea of a “free year” pretty enticing. It’s not that I want a break. I’m certainly feeling burnt out; it’s hard for me to tackle learning with the same vigor as before, but I know that it will slow down a bit after this semester and that I could take it in stride if I wanted to. I don’t want to take a year for the sake of taking time. I would like to have a purpose for that time. But as I think about what that purpose would be, a lot of it is about time: making time for things important to me that have slipped in the busy of third year. And I’ve enjoyed being a student; it has afforded me valuable time with people, time that I know I won’t have in residency when I graduate. And while I’m really eager to learn the practical and intellectual skills in residency that I’ll need to take care of patients in the future, I also want to know people more deeply before I presume to be a care provider of them. Maybe it’s because I’m slow at learning things, but I accept that and I would like to be a student of people for a little longer.

There are a few things I would like to do with a year, the biggest being to be able to write about some of the experiences we’ve had in the hospital, and how they’re related for me to my life in general. Associated with that, I’d like to have more experiences with people, and I’ve found a mentor enthusiastic about forming a project around me simply spending time talking with patients, a population of patients to whom I’m particularly drawn. I also want more clinical experience in different places; I’d like to do both a primary care and hospice elective in Uganda, an ob-gyn subinternship in New Mexico, and a hospice elective here at Connecticut Hospice (the first one established in the States). There are others, but I’m trying to limit myself in order to focus on a few things, because even as I try to hold back while writing now, I know it’s hard not to overload a blank slate of a year.

There are many things I worry about in making this decision. We say it’s just one year, and it’s very true in the long run. Yet somehow it still carries more weight. I didn’t give a second thought to taking a year before medical school; I needed it both practically and internally. But though I’m not sure what I would’ve been like without that year, I don’t particularly look back on that year as one of much growth or significance. I don’t want this to be like that, especially because as I said, for various reasons, it carries more weight now at almost twenty-six years old than it did back then at twenty-two.

Taking another year isn’t exactly taking an “extra” year; the time has to come from somewhere. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I don’t think about the same things as other girls my age in terms of relationships and the future, which though distant now won’t feel so much so when I graduate, especially if that’s in two years instead of one. The relationships (in the way I define relating to a person) I’ve had here have been worthwhile and valuable emotionally, but also tumultuous and inconducive to what I eventually want concretely. Finding quality and compatibility is hard enough, but doing that in the realm of logistics and future is even worse, and as such I’ve largely avoided the endeavor of considering anything beyond the present. During the time I stay here, I’d probably continue doing that, and can I really keep avoiding it for so long? On the other end, who’s to say that graduating, moving, and working intensely will bring me out of the place I’m in, any better than staying here? On the same lines, I miss my family a lot, and another year here is another year away from them, but graduation doesn’t bring any guarantees that I’ll be closer to them.

I worry I’ll be restless, as I often am while in the educational system, with the idea of not doing anything concrete to be useful. With the sense of constantly being trained for something that seems so distant. I also worry that the insane momentum of third year distorts and exaggerates my need for time, that perhaps I only wish to take it because it’s there for taking. At the same time I wonder if this is an unexpected gift, as this school has been as a whole, and whether I shouldn’t shy away from something simply because it wasn’t in my original plans. Honestly, the idea of this—the time, the commitment to writing, the uncertainty of what I can do and how it will all fit together—scares me like hell. While as a general philosophy I believe in things falling into place, and they’ve been chaotic before and always have fallen right, I’ve had the benefit of the outline of things still following an overall path. I don’t know if this year really falls into any concrete way for me to go, and I know it’s largely up to me to make it worth something.

A friend recently made fun of me for still wearing a watch, now that cell phones have replaced every daily function including checking the time. I love my watch, which was a Christmas gift from my oldest brother in 2001 who said I never knew what time it was, so I’ve had it for nearly a decade and have had to change the battery a couple times in that time period. It uses hands and it has only four dots on its face to signify every three hours, without any numbers. Since I’ve been on surgery I can’t wear it, and yesterday I realized it was the weekend and I could wear it. This morning I went to the gym and took it off as I normally do when running. Since I’d gotten used to not having to do this during the week, when it was time to go, I forgot to put it back on. After I came home and noticed it was missing, it took me some time to realize this is what was happened. It probably took me more time than usual to connect the sequence of events because we'd taken a detour on our way home, and sat on a hammock we saw outside one of the colleges. It was a usual cold winter day with sun and old snow, and we sank into the hammock with ease. I told my roommate I would go get my watch after showering and getting dressed, but she said I should go now, as the more time passed the more likely it was that something would happen to it. So as I hurried back to get it (bemoaning the minutes I was losing doing this, as I’d planned on being on my way out to the architecture library by two o’clock and it would already be two by the time I reached the gym again), I thought how funny and fitting it was to literally find time. Even if it’s gaining back something you lost, and not giving you any more than baseline; even if it’s actually taking some away from you as you do it, time feels different when it’s passing than when it’s found and taken.