Brevity is the Soul of Wit

A friend asked in a letter,

Still thinking of being a people doctor? have you switched at all more toward research?

The question has been on my mind a lot, and I guess it had built up enough pressure. My response was disproportionate.

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Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit, and tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief:It’s funny. I’m applying to transfer into a US medical school pretty soon which means a handful of personal statements. And for all the writing that I’ve done, I still have no idea how to do it correctly. I’ve tried to get to a point in my life where I understand who I am and why I do the things that I do, but I’m just not there yet. Which is fine, it just makes it hard to convince someone else that you’ve got the reigns in your hand, so to speak. It’s always ugly, but whenever you can’t prove or demonstrate something positively, there’s always the reductio ad absurdum. As far as I go, it’s the best I can do.

As it stands, I’m still curious about damn near everything. I have a folder called “million dollar ideas,” one called “essays” and one called “research.” I see problems everywhere and I love obsessing over solutions, and all of these interests pull me deeper into medicine. It’s just so deep and so wide, there’s enough room for anyone to lose themselves or find themselves. That’s why I’m here, I guess.

I’ve always joked with people when they ask me, “So why do you want to be a doctor?” My typical answer is that I’d be too bored with anything else, and that’s a half truth. I only see the rest when I work backwards:

I’d love to be a surgeon, but the malpractice risk and insurance along with dropping pay are off-putting, so I guess I want to be paid well according to my skill and don’t want to enter a field where that may not happen. I’d love to be a pathologist with all the time to write, do research, dissect. But I’d miss the patients. I’m reluctant to admit it, but I would miss the satisfaction that comes from someone you’ve treated thanking you with their eyes. Internal medicine is appealing for the challenge of trying to know everything about everything, but the patient exposure is above what I’d like and the pay seems off the worth. I guess I want to see people, but not all the time. I want to write, I want to teach, I want to cut, I want to cure, I want to be paid what I’m worth and I want time to enjoy the fruits and to share it with a family. I have two years left to figure out if anything fits those criteria, but from here things still look pretty messy.

I still don’t know what I’ll end up doing, but I hold fast to the belief that something fits. I want to transfer because I feel like I’m running out of time to make that decision cleanly. More exposure, more people, more resources and all of it right now would go a long ways to convincing me that I’d seen the field, taken stock, and decided on my future. If it turns out that there’s some unanswered question that I think I can tackle and is worth my life’s efforts, then I want to be exposed to it. I worry, a lot, that I’ll miss that opportunity if I stay with my current school.

The facilities, the people, and the open doors of a US medical school would be an embarrassment of riches for me at this point. In the time that I’ve studied with less, I feel like I’ve used everything available so that now, finally, I know how valuable those opportunities are and I’m ready to make the most of them. I’m praying for the chance.

Until that happens, I won’t know if it’s people or research.

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