experience

I wanted to do medicine for a strong desire for something vague--experience. I spent a good chunk of my life reading stories, thinking about stories, cooped up inside of myself. I wanted to see things, do things, understand things, as a means to reach outwards. I wasn't sure of the actual texture and contours of these endeavors, but I knew that I wanted texture and contours. And the main reason I love med school is that it has been just that. It's let me in on so much experience.

There's so much variety. We rotate through so many different areas of medicine that we constantly see people dealing with different aspects of life. A sudden heart attack, the realities of the deficits of a stroke, a long struggle with cancer, a steady adjustment to a chronic disease, recovering from the pains of a surgery, having parts of your body rearranged, having parts of your body removed, giving birth, terminating a pregnancy, battling mind with mind, losing movement, losing thought, recovering movement, recovering thought--so much can happen to a person, and each experience tells you so much about people and what's around people and what's in between people and what's independent of people.

A friend of mine recently mentioned an aversion for how a crowd of people tend to respond to things in the same way, stripping people of their individual qualities and interactions with things around them. Once you've chosen your path in medicine, it's easy to do this to people, by nature of seeing similar things over and over. But even within the same experience, there's depth and nuance. I saw four women give birth today and each one was different. Each person feels things differently; expresses in their own way; lives what happens to them as only they are fit to do.

In one day there were these experiences, for me to absorb and give back in some form. Today was a long day and I have to write quickly so nothing will be entirely accurate or remotely elegant, but at the least it's fresh. One of my top ten things is seeing people do things for the first time. Two women gave birth for the first time. Many sets of eyes saw the outside for the first time. I delivered my first baby, a six pound girl with curly black hair. I tried my hardest to hold it like a football but I probably forgot how because my memory sometimes fades in the presence of wonder. When pushed to do more, one woman immersed in pain continued to give more and more. Her friend of twenty plus years hung onto her leg and told her the baby was getting closer and closer ("you're lying!"). The father of one baby held tentatively to the mother's foot, unattached or unsure. A head popped from the abdomen (perhaps blossoming is more ethereal but popping is what it was); in another, the foot came first. These ones were purply gray, wrinkly, gross and so damn gorgeous it hurt you through your double gloved hands. He said his little girl was suffering from ET skin, so apt. There is a female camaraderie where certain things can be said in the open and cause laughter and comfort, as women just met share something momentary and lasting. There is a lot of endurance but only because there is a lot of pain, and it reminds you that you're here not for a blip but for the spectrum.