I feel like I exist in a state of duality ever since I started seeing patients in my medical training. I woke up today, on my day off and opened the blinds. The sunlight hit my skin and overwhelmed my vision like a warm searchlight, and I took a while to adjust to the flood of light in my room.
We wake up sometimes carefree on our day off while so many lives are being changed in the hospital just down the street. It's an odd existence. You spend some days literally running between patient hospital rooms, sometimes a bit melancholy due to a patient's condition and the way they are handling a disease, to put on the face of someone intelligent, capable, highly logical, yet warm and human.
Medicine might involve a bit of acting and suppressing your emotions, but I think once people stop doing that, they start letting their fatigue show, along with a bit of bitterness and a disappointment with so many missed opportunities to have a meaningful life outside of their career.
That also echoes how important it is to pick a specialty where you'll be happy all the time, or at least most of the time. I know I love the operating room and its immediacy, the pace, how you get locked in on a case and forget the rest of the world until you're done.
For some reason I keep thinking about the time I closed a stab wound on a patient's abdomen, it's like this memory that keeps surfacing in my mind. It's curious how different our lives are on a daily basis. One day we're spending time with family, or out with friends, then the other day we're closing wounds at 3am during the 14th hour we've spent in the hospital for the day, with 5 more to go.
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