“I want to be a doctor. How do I do it?”
As a teenager, I was very shy and very awkward. Talking to strangers was a painful and anxiety-laden task, and I didn’t like to talk to strangers any longer than necessary. So when a pediatrician asked me, at a routine office visit, if I had any questions, I surprised myself by blurting out, “I want to be a doctor. How do I do it?” I had never seen the same pediatrician twice, mainly because most of them were residents-in-training. This one was caught off-guard by the question, so she rambled a bit. She talked about medical school and residency and fellowship, about job security and the logistics of working in a practice, about other things she must have been preoccupied with in the scope and span of her professional life, things that I couldn’t know. She finished talking and exited the room, leaving my mother and I to wait.
The two of us had recently been talking about my future career. She was a nurse, and though there were many positive experiences she would share at the dinner table with me, the impact of many negative experiences caused her to humbly and gently discourage me from going into the medical field myself. She would tell me how hard and how stressful it could be, how many of its demands were dirty, unforgiving, and intense. She was a similarly introverted person who chose the work for a very adult-like reason: it was good work that provided a good opportunity for migrating to America. She would tell me stories about her first day of nursing school in her home country, how the new students were led down to the large formaldehyde “pool” in the basement where an instructor immediately plucked out a dripping arm and began teaching. She told me that people promptly vomited and a third of the class dropped out that day, and that she strongly considered doing the same thing herself. [Read more…] about Do You Want to Be a Doctor?