The other day, I was in class with about a dozen other second-year med schoolers.
It's the class-every med school has it, I'm sure-where we get a chance to talk about our feelings and emotions and things unrelated to pathology, physiology and/or pathophysiology. Things happen fast in med school, and you learn a lot of things and you feel certain ways about some of the things you see and learn, and it's not like the people teaching you-who have only seen everything and felt everything about a million times-really have time to help you work out your feelings.
So that's why we have this class. Duke Med calls it practice course, I like to think of it as "Hey, you're in med school and you're going to be a doctor, but just for right now let's pretend you're a normal human being" course.
Anyway, I was confiding to my classmates that I might've felt a little bit like crying the first time I caught a baby coming out of its mother's vagina.
(To be fair, and now that I think about it, it was a little dusty in the room on account of the air filter being broken, and I've never been bothered by a dust allergy, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. And to be even fairer, there was a Hibachi chef in the corner of the room chopping up onions to make into an onion volcano that he promptly lit at the moment of the baby's birth.)
I made it pretty clear that I did not actually cry or even tear up. I just told them that it was an emotional moment, and I might've been moved a little bit.
As embarrassing as telling my classmates about my emotions was, I told them because I was pretty happy about the way I felt.
In the beginning part of the year, I was all about surviving. Let's just say I don't like new situations-I only like people I've already met and movies I've already seen. Being in the hospital pretending to be a doctor was the newest and most frightening experience of my life. Not only was the experience new, but I was dumb. I wanted to make as few mistakes as possible and was incredibly nervous pretty much all the time.
It took me the entire first four weeks of the year to realize that I knew nothing about the personal lives' of the patients I was taking care of, and another four weeks to figure out that I could (and should) do something to fix it.
My solution? I asked almost all of them how they're doing, where they're from and what they like to do when they're not in the hospital.
When I spell it out like that, it seems stupid and obvious. Of course I'd make small talk with my patients! I mean, what's the other option? Walking in the room at 4 a.m. without introducing myself and asking if they'd moved their bowels yet that day?
Um, yes.
Basically, instead of being a normal human being, I was a man wearing a three-piece ground beef suit and prosciutto underpants surrounded by a pack of wild dingoes. I was even mean and sarcastic to my friends and family because just being at school made me so tense. I didn't have time for my own feelings, much less for empathizing with someone else's.
Now I'm nervous less often--though I'd still describe my primary emotions while I'm in the hospital as either "man wearing prosciutto underpants surrounded by dingoes" or "sweaty"-and shockingly, I'm realizing that I was capable of being a human being all along.
So yeah, I was pretty proud of myself when I was moved by the momentous occasion in my patients' life.
Anyway, the next day I was talking to one of my classmates who had heard my confession from the day before. I told her that only 15 minutes ago, I had caught another baby. And she looked at me, and asked sarcastically, "So did you cry?"
My classmates are so understanding.
Alex Fanaroff, Trinity '07, is a second-year medical student. His column runs every other Thursday.
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