Chapter 2:
It's been a long while since I wrote anything on this site, and as always, one of the best reasons I had to delay writing anything was that I didn't want to have to sum up all that's happened in between. However, the experiences I'm being exposed to right now aren't worth waiting for a time when I can sit down and write about everything in between. More importantly, if the time in between never drove me to take time out of my day to write about it, it probably isn't worth your time to read either. So here I am, three weeks into what I expect to be the single most important, exhausting, and encompassing year I'm supposed to have, and I'm bringing the blog back. 3rd year of medical school in the US is supposed to be one of the most privileged experiences the world has to offer. This year, I'm going to watch people die. I'm going to watch people get born. I'm going to help guide people through all stages in between, using some of the most sophisticated technological and psychological tactics the Western World has come up with to date. I'm also going to get the chance to hurt someone. Or to keep dying people alive for weeks or even months longer than they would ever have wanted to be kept alive, and I have to deny a patient the right to die peacefully because his mental state had already deteriorated at that point beyond "legal decision-making capacity." Or, who knows, I might make someone's life a far better place.
Whatever happens, I'll do my best to write something about it. Because it's interesting, and fun to read. But more importantly, I need the pressure valve. A stranger was kind enough to point out to me at a party this weekend, after I walked in and didn't even sit down before starting on a rant with the first person i saw that would take me through the next half hour. Without saying hello, I started complaining to anybody in ear shot about how crazy my past 3 weeks had been, how i've been working 80 hour weeks and communicating with terrified parents in broken spanish that their kid may or may not have a brain tumor, and if he does then it's good news because that means we can fix it and he might not have to be on lifetime seizure meds, or that their 11-year old kid with a metabolic disorder is "healthy" again and can be sent home to spend the next 11 years the same way as the first--as a gastric-tube fed wide-eyed child with uncurable propensity for turning his own muscle into a poison that has turned his brain to mush and left him with the intellect of a 6-month old.
This stranger, in his generosity, reflected to me the impression that I had become an overworked "Type A" of some sort of "higher intellect" that seeks to justify his own hard work by imposing his experiences on others. Insults aside, I couldn't agree with any of these claims, especially to call me a "Type A." Except he was right, because he hadn't known me in my 26 years before I had become this so-called "Type A personality," and in that moment I was being exactly that way and doing exactly that.
So here's my solution. Instead of walking into every future social situation as a maybe-interesting-story waiting to happen, I'm going to prep myself by getting them out of my system here. On this website. Something happens, it goes here first. From now on. That way, hopefully, I can start to appreciate social interactions for something more than a way to hear myself talk.
So that's my introduction. Chapter 2.
