Thursday, April 8, 2010

The biggest tangent ever award

I'm writing from my office at Student Health, the last day of my four-week placement, and am more than a little sad that I'm leaving. Being semester break it's been deathly quiet here this past week. I'm not even afraid to use the Q-word because there is seriously no way the Q-word curse will have any effect. A lot of the doctors are away too for various reasons so I'm a bit disappointed I won't be able to say goodbye to them all. I bought along my basket of home-baked goods as per tradition which everyone seems to be enjoying (yay!), with one of the nurses trying to convince me to quit med school and try out for "Master Baker" (lol; try saying that fast ten times!). (What she meant was Master Chef and/or NZ's Hottest Baker.)

I gotta say this is the first time that saying goodbye to a placement has been hard for me. The thing I've loved about med school and, actually, a career in medicine in general is that it's great for people like myself who have a relatively short attention span, people who thrive off of change. Since starting clinical rotations the moving around different workplaces, different wards, different teams of people, have always provided that breath of fresh air at just the right moment -- as the initial excitement begins to wear off, four or five weeks later.

Maybe that's why in your early-mid twenties, it's easy to find surgical training exciting and sexy, Grey's Anatomy style. You're young, full of energy, physically at your prime and, for most of us, not tied down in any significant way. We can move around to different hospitals and different cities as we're assigned, work those crazy crazy hours each week, stick around for that extra surgery you hear about as you were leaving at midnight because it's one of the surgeries you haven't seen before and sure you can survive on three hours less sleep tonight.

But... and here's the million dollar question: what happens if/when you find a place that you actually don't want to leave?


Despite being in my early twenties and at a place in my life where the "gypsy" lifestyle remains du jour, I am starting to see what a fragile balance it really is -- how quickly being settled down could suddenly become oh-so attractive. And at this moment I am freaked out simply by the idea, the possibility, that I might actually one day desire being settled down in that oh-so permanent way. I never knew what that might feel like until today when I got a glimpse of how it felt to leave a place I wasn't ready to leave, and the heartstrings that got achingly pulled as I did.

I strive to live my life on purpose, always and constantly forging ahead. But I wonder, is that because that's who I am, or, because it's where I am in my life right now? I've always thought it was the former... but what if it's a little bit of both? Luckily, for now, they're on the same page. But what if that changes? What happens if or when I reach a place where those two elements begin to conflict? What happens then?

I know. I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Man, I think waaaay too much.


It's my older sister's birthday today. She rocks my world. It's strange, this is her second birthday spent in a different city, living her own life, in her own world, with her own cast and crew and background music. Is it just me or does almost everything serve as a reminder of our own mortality? Not in a dark and depressing sense, but in a reflective, nostalgic, grateful, with each day and each year we age, grow, change kind of way...

Life... is like an around-the-world plane ticket. You start at one place with a certain mileage limit, with as many stops in as many cities as you'd like but all in that one same direction, with the one condition of no going backwards... and eventually, you reach the end.

An awareness of our own mortality, for me, keeps everything in perspective. It serves as a reminder to ask myself, really, what is the point of it all? And each day, for me, the answer remains the same: to love our God and to love our neighbour. To love my neighbour. That's basically it in a nutshell.

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