Life as we know it

I kind of lost it last week. I somehow managed to keep the insanity at bay till after the boards but then Tuesday morning or really Monday night I just suddenly couldn’t hold on any more.  And I just cried and cried more than I ever remember crying.  It wasn’t really the boards if anything it was the fact they were over and I now had to face going back to medical school which apparently was a very negative idea.  Really since last Sept I have been chronically disillusioned with my decision to pursue medicine. I have blogged about it but I haven’t really talked about it to anyone beyond a few very close friends and family members.  No one from medical school and very few people from my life in Winston even know. I never really decided it was a big secret but apparently it was.

So there I am sobbing on the porch swing on a gorgeous Spring Day with my Dad trying to figure out what the heck has happened.  I am just a mess of exhaustion, frustration and hysterics. Then slowly it just all spills out all my doubts, all my loathing for aspects of the medical profession and all my desires and fears of entrapment in a job I hate that consumes my life. I just laid it all out and I was shocked at how forthcoming I was. Once it was out there I was numb, spent.  I fled to an old haunt of mine high up away from civilization and just sat in silence for a while.

I woke up at dawn last Wed and packed my car, said good bye to my mom and drove south.  I was standing in the Dean’s Office by 9. I was composed and calm and I did exactly what I had done to my Dad (minus the hysterics, with considerably better diction and syntax) the day before.  I kept waiting to feel  foolish and melodramatic and vulernable but I didn’t. I felt incredibly relieved.  O (the Dean) didn’t shoot me down or tell me to suck it up.  He offered a single comment that wasn’t particularly profound or earth shattering. But it was something that strayed slightly from the party line of: life will get better third year, you will be a good doctor, look how well you are doing and we really need people like you in medicine.  He told me something to the effect: The problem with you and medicine is you already know exactly what you want in life and who you are. The average 23 yr old med student comes in looking for a system to fit into, you came in wanting the system to fit into your vision of what it should be.  Its not a problem necessarily he went on to say but its certainly makes life different. Think about your decision, he told me, but you will know what to do when its time to make it.

Somewhere over Mississippi I just came back together. It wasn’t the advice or the sobbing. It was the falling apart and admitting it.  I supposed somewhere in the mist of second year   I buried my theology for a time under a pile of endless notes, small disasters and an endless flood of personal perfectionism.  It is in our brokenness that we are whole.  It is admitting  our doubts we keep our faith in our God, in our visions and in ourselves.