A First-Year Student Evolves to FindJoy and Peace in Medical School
I distinctly remember this dream I had when I was little of being able to breathe underwater. It was surreal, cool, and calming. It made no sense, but it also made perfect sense somehow, because I was doing it and not drowning. It was the best dream I ever had.
Med school often feels like being underwater, and they’re asking you to breathe. You think, “I’m no fish,” this can’t be humanly possible. At first you choke. The pressure of the water never lessens, and you’re swallowing so much you feel sick. You just start to understand one wave of information when you’re hit with another, and wonder why you ever left dry land. You panic and you doubt, you let the water pass over you again and again, but eventually you don’t feel drowned with every new wave. You realize you’ve grown gills to filter out the most “high yield” information, and scales to protect you from the immense pressure.
You don’t need to know every drop of information, and furthermore you realize its impossibility — the ocean is vast and ever expanding. It is also ancient, much like the practice of medicine, present since the beginning of human life, ebbing and flowing constantly with advancement and regression, but ultimately making slow progress, wearing down rocks into sand, major phenomenon into greater and greater granularity that we can understand.
After a while, you feel at peace underwater. You realize you always were a fish, and you find joy in connecting to this ancient practice, thankful for all those who came before you. You thrive under the pressure of the ocean, and can’t imagine how you survived on land all those years.
In the ocean you are trusted to see places that no one else has been. Amidst the turmoil and tides, there is a quiet beauty to it. Most people can see pictures of a shipwreck, but we are the fish who get to explore every nook and cranny of it. My class recently had the privilege of opening up cadaver skulls in the anatomy lab and taking out the brain. It’s small and gray, not at all like the colored diagrams in textbooks. The textbooks are always examples of nonexistent, perfect people. Real bodies are messy, tangled, and confusing. They are sacred, like looking at a secret or someone laying in front of you all the broken pieces of them — something no one should ever see, yet we have the privilege to.
Every day in the ocean of medical school is challenging, but every day I become a stronger swimmer and a better explorer. I’m so grateful that I can breathe underwater all the time now, not just in my dreams.
