Pluripotent

Don't get me wrong. I never want to go through the hell of med school again. One of my friends was thinking about a second career in medicine, and I honestly think that if I had to go through medical school and residency again, I would quit. It's too hard to do twice.

But there are some things about medical school that I miss terribly, because it's stuff that I can't get back. I remember my first perfectly done suture. It was a vertical mattress, and the tails were just right. I remember following a running suture during a vascular surgery. Afterward, the surgeon told me that he'd never let a med student touch a vessel he was working on, but he trusted me. I miss the excitement of seeing my first trauma, a 20 yr old female MVA, no LOC, FAST scan negative, c-spine cleared. I miss the novel sense of horror upon seeing an apple core lesion on CT abdomen.

But most of all, I miss that moment in medical school when I was not an internist. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, but I knew that I was capable of anything. It was entirely within my power to pick my medical specialty.

There was a very similar moment that occurred in college. I remember it exactly. It was 6:54 PM and I was getting out of chemistry lab. It was twilight, and as I walked home from lab, I stopped at one particular tree about 40 yards from the chem building. At that moment, I could be whatever I wanted to be in life. I could be a lawyer, doctor, investment banker, veterinarian, librarian, computer programmer... All my life and education had led me to that one point in time where I could choose, differentiate. I was a stem cell.

That is what I miss about medical school. I don't miss the studying or the work. I miss being pluripotent.

Choices

When I was finishing up residency, I was working with some medical students. One of the students was absolutely gorgeous. She had this wavy, brunette hair that seemed to flow like water. And she had this scent to her that was so intoxicating. I found myself following her unconsciously, completely entranced by her smell.

She had a crush on me too. Sometimes, I don't know these things. My social skills are poor at best. But with this girl, I knew. Her gaze would linger a little too long. She would look down when I was talking to her, afraid to make eye contact. She kept her head tilted slightly, in that kind of daydreaming pose.

I think about this girl every now and then, and the long string of girls like her whom I have met briefly, and then have left my life. Either I was going or they were, never in those ideal circumstances you see in the movies. And so we meet and we part, with the vague notion that maybe we could've done something, but for the timing.

And I realize now that the problem was never the circumstances or the timing or whatever else. The problem was the choices I've made. When you can appreciate the choices you've made in life, it becomes very difficult to avoid reality. I've made some choices, some of which were terrible. And it became clear to me that as unhappy as I've been, it was from my own hand.

People make fun of the second Matrix movie, but there was an extremely profound line in it. The Oracle tells Neo, "We can never see past the choices we don't understand... you've already made the choice. Now you have to understand it."

When I heard this line in the movie, I thought this was so trite. But looking at my own life, I can see now that my life is composed of the decisions I have already made, and the most anxiety, the most angst is tied behind decisions that I have made and never understood. And as I shed light on them, it becomes clear to me the effects of these choices, and how terrible it truly is that we can't change the decisions we've already made.

Because for the last 15 years of my life, I have chosen everything over love. I was scared of love, and I still am. And it scares me because everything I love leaves me. And gazing with a critical eye, I can see that I have made some remarkably poor choices, in order that I could wake up in the morning and not shoot myself, but exorcising all joy from my life.

Now, understanding the choices I've made is all very enlightening, but it doesn't answer the very simple question: will I choose to love? I don't know. It's one thing to see the gears. It's another thing to be a clocksmith.