A Loud Resolve

This evening I met a fourth grader with big dreams. As I sat on the floor of the bookstore browsing the book I was considering for purchase, he plopped down right in front of me, where the science section was. Jana was with me and we looked at each other, muttering how adorable he was under our breaths. We inquired if he was interested in science, “I want to be a heart surgeon,” he replied succinctly and without hesitance—his few words could not hide the passion in his heart for this. Through more inquiry from our part he told us the reason behind such decision: he was born with a D-transposition of the great arteries and it was of course the heart surgeon who gave him hope of life at all. It made perfect sense that he would pursue this field in such a directed manner, but it still impressed me that he did. Many people whose life has changed because of a procedure like that live at best thankful that it happened. He, on the contrary, took the gift given him (life) and turned around desperately wanting to give back as if saying, “What they did for me I want to do for others.”

This is kind of the story of my life, though perhaps in a less dramatic way than this little fellow. So,he got me thinking about why I want to do medicine at all.

My college mentor, Dr. Beth Impson, is an incredible writer and teacher, I gleaned wisdom from her in our personal conversations and in her classroom, wisdom I have carried with me until now. She once said, about her passion in life, “Writing brings me fully alive, because it connects me as nothing else but childbirth ever has with reality.” Thinking about medicine, I can only echo her heart describing why this field has become my passion. Suffering wakes me to reality, and it is because of it that this profession exists “it is not those who are well that need a Doctor,” Jesus said. I feel most fully alive when I have helped soothe someone’s affliction, when I have offered hope to the hopeless, when I have had a part in the process of healing, whether emotional or physical, pain.

I wake up to the reality that our world is broken but that we desperately seek, as we must, to offer hope to it. This is what care givers pursue: Giving a person hope for restoration of well-being.

I realize however, that there is much suffering that we cannot and will not be able to alleviate in the world. Yet this too connects me to reality, because it brings me back to the fact that we have but one life, that we have only a determined time on earth as we will all face death one day.

I accept this reality, but do not go softly into it, as Dylan Thomas once did, I too “rage, rage against the dying of the light.” I rage against death through medicine, not to avoid it—that is impossible—nor to defer it—this is not under my control—but to face it, face it with a well lived life. 

I rage against death because it is not what was meant to be, though it is the one thing we know to be sure for all, it seems the most unnatural. We were made for life. And this short shot at it we have is it,  and since this is the aspect I can help, I can improve, I can invest in... I will. I want people to live full lives.

Yet, people in general do not think about what that means, and I don't either.  We wake up, we go here and there, and pay bills, and drink coffee, and talk to our friends.  But then disease strikes, and our brother dies, and we have two weeks to live and we wonder for the first time:  What is a full life? What's the meaning of it all? And where is God in all this? We ask the questions worth asking when there's hardly any time for answers, and we give way to despair.  

Being part of the medical field, makes one such a go-to person in some of these situations, when the questions that were once only in our heads are tangibly riding with us in an ambulance. I can not dream of a better place to be than where people are brutally awakened, as am I,  in these ways and be the one to scream to ears deafened by calamity, with all that I am: HOPE.