Is the Road to Becoming A Physician Still Worth It?
In a simplistic answer, “Yes, it is. But it won’t be easy.” As my former track and field coach would tell me before an arduous workout, “If it were easy, everyone would do it.” Many are drawn to medicine with an affable desire to help others, but this task has a significant weight associated with it. Sadly, the mental anguish may lead some physicians to tell hopeful doctors that they should turn away and pursue a different occupation forgetting the excitement and enthusiasm they once felt.
Naturally, over the course of a time period there are certain parts of our lives that change. One day you fall asleep at 20 years old, and the next day you wake up 21, now considered legally responsible enough to drink, gamble or even adopt a child. In contrast, the road to becoming a doctor is a long series of intentional and mindful decisions. Few of these decisions are big, some are medium and unlike the television shows most are small and boring. If you’re reading this you may wish, as I think I did at times, that we could instantaneously wake up a physician. But, the beauty in becoming a physician is in transforming into the version of yourself that will best fulfill this life of service. This becoming requires sacrifices in the form of no; no to certain parties, trips, weddings, and relationships. Instead, one will say yes to long, unappreciated and unapologetic hours with concomitant late nights in windowless rooms surrounded by books instead of people and silence instead of noise. Sometimes, I said yes to the no decisions and years later had to work much harder to make up for those responses. Furthermore, there are also decisions one will need to make during moments where we are no longer in control.
Writer Anne Lamott, once penned, “When God is going to do something wonderful, he always starts with a hardship; when God is going to do something amazing, he starts with an impossibility.”
From a post-baccalaureate, non-traditional, student studying in a Starbucks coffee shop in Manassas, Virginia to addressing the audience as student body president at the Ohio State University College of Medicine graduation I had to navigate my failures to arrive at my successes. However, each piece of adversity I faced sculpted me into a more compassionate and understanding person and ultimately a better physician.
The first African American patient I treated, sixty-years in age, told me he had never seen a physician who looked like me—like us he meant.
If this dream will make you happy and give you the life you desire, then this field is for you. No one can answer this question for you, and no one should. The time will go by regardless. One day I walked into the auditorium for my first medical school course. The next, I was performing a nasal intubation in a patient with severe Down’s Syndrome readying the patient for the dentistry team to extract his diseased teeth. There is nothing like what I see or do on a daily basis. It is simply amazing, frightful, enlightening and humbling all in the same breath. As I said before, “Yes, it is worth it.” But, it’s up to you to decide that for yourself.