Emerging Scholars Blog

InterVarsity's Emerging Scholars Network

physician

In Its Time

[The third post in a series on becoming a Christian physician. Earlier posts are Do You Want to Be a Doctor? and Helping People Is Not Enough].

Editor’s note: Lacking joy in the ordinary (and necessary) practice of eating? Bob Trube’s Book Review: Eat with Joy (Rachel Marie Stone. InterVarsity Press, 2013) provides “a taste” of a helpful resource.

After working 24 hours on call in the pediatric ICU, I was exhausted. I wanted to sleep, but friends had recently been reminding me of the health benefits of breakfast, so I dragged myself to a local diner for breakfast and sat at the counter next to a father and his little daughter. “We graduated from the booth to the counter,” he was explaining to the waitress, trying to hide his pride. The little girl looked shyly up, swiveling playfully on the rotating seat as she stretched up to rest her elbows on the countertop. I tried not to glance at them too much, but I was overwhelmed and fascinated by many simple things: the widening of her eyes at the stack of pancakes, the delighted silence as she chewed her way through the syrupy mess, the polite sips of tart orange juice from a well-worn cup.

The hospital tends to “stick” or creep into the outside world. That weekend I had been having nightmares, imagining what it would be like to suddenly find that my eight year old daughter was brain-dead, or my ten year old son was killed in a car accident, or my brother’s cold turned out to be leukemia.*  Random and otherwise innocent sounds would make me think of beeping monitors and noisy breathing machines. It seemed difficult to completely extract myself from the hospital. Even when I went to the DMV, the inspector saw me in scrubs and asked, in an attempt to connect, “Do you work in the hospital?  Have you seen dead people? . . . Are some of them children? That must be hard; I can’t imagine.” [Read more…] about In Its Time

Helping People Is Not Enough

Surgeons operating on a patient. “surgery”. Photograph. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Web. 22 Aug. 2013. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/media/120264/Surgeons-operating-on-a-patient

[This is the second post in a series on becoming a Christian physician. The series began with Do You Want to Be a Doctor?]

“Why do you want to work in healthcare?”

“I want to help people.”

This dialogue is the most common conversation people will have about a career in medicine. The way we think about healthcare professionals tends towards the poignant and provocative: heroic paramedics and EMTs in ambulances, austere physicians and pharmacists and lab researchers in crisp white coats, dutiful and deeply compassionate nurses in a hospital ward, charming and encouraging therapists in the office. By and large, these images are positive ones of trust, care, and goodness.

These perspectives have a special resonance with the current generation because they reflect genuine and people-oriented views in an otherwise superficial and increasingly disconnected society. Today’s aspiring professionals are idealists, but many of them are also suspicious of systems, corporations, and financial interests. The rising workforce is relational and post-modern, seeking out “authentic” experiences and friendships grounded in elements that reflect something valuable, tangible, and indisputably good. It is therefore logical to prize healthcare highly as a career, for what experiences can be more raw, positively-minded, and relationally-oriented than the alleviation of suffering, the curing of illness, and the postponement of death? [Read more…] about Helping People Is Not Enough

Do You Want to Be a Doctor?

Editor’s note: In the context of vocational decision making in the complexity of higher education, this is an introduction to a series on becoming a Christian physician by the Urban Resident. The material in this post is also running on The Urban Resident blog , which has a significant number of the other resources which may interest you. ~ Thomas B. Grosh IV

“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?

Do Doctors Make Bank?

Summer had finally emerged and we were sitting out on my front steps, enjoying the afternoon heat and watching some of the other kids play out on the street.  Some of the teenagers were casually tossing a football around, throwing it high and watching it bounce among the electrical wires, tree branches, and car windows before skittering along the pavement to be chased endlessly by the smaller children.  Others were riding their bicycles for show, popping up the front wheel as they furiously pumped their pedals to maintain balance.  It was idyllically urban, and I was thoroughly enjoying the leisurely scene after a month of long and hectic hours working at the hospital.

“Your parents must be rich, right?”  It was an odd, abrupt question, and I pulled my eyes away from the street to take a moment and try to understand exactly what had just been asked.  The twelve-year-old sitting next to me looked my way, waiting for a response.  I stalled.

“What?”

“Your parents, they must be rich right?”  If there was any ambiguity in the question, he eliminated it.  “For you to go to medical school.  Your parents must be rich, right?”

It was not the first time we had talked about money.  He lived down the block, and though we had come to be good neighbors and friends over the past year, he would say things that had a similarly peculiar way of making me fumble for words.  Before, they had been questions or comments like, “Why would you want to live here?” or “I know a doctor makes bank; you must be making bank”  One eight-year old quipped to me, “Nobody wants to move into the North side.”  When I first heard it, I thought it was sad and troubling that a child could grow up knowing that his neighbors lived there out of obligation instead of choice.  When I hear it now, I still think that.

But this question had a different flavor to it.  “Why do you have to be rich to become a doctor?” I asked.

“Cause, school is expensive.  So you need to have a lot of money to be able to get there, right?”

“Well . . . you have to borrow a lot, and then pay it back.”  That answer didn’t sit well with me, so I tried to explain.  “I mean, isn’t that why doctor’s make money?  Cause they’re in debt, and they need to pay it back?”  That answer wasn’t any better, so I shut up.

“Whatever.  Doctors make bank.”  He couldn’t be shaken from this thought.  Neither could I.

[Read more…] about Do Doctors Make Bank?