***
I was back in lab, staring at the brain again. I rolled it over and over in my hand, identifying various lobules. Instead of looking at tiny sections of brain, I wanted to get the big picture. Holding up the brain, it didn’t seem like much on the outside. The frontal lobe, the seat of higher intellect. The parietal, the sensual lobe that coordinates cognition with experience, occipital lobe, the movie screen in the back of your head which makes sense of electrical signals that come from your eyes. cerebellum, pons, midbrain, medulla.
We are made of blood and spit, shit and piss. Illness can drain a person of everything they recognize about themselves. In the hospital, technicians poke at them with needles, nurses order them around as if they were children, and even their own bodies rebel against them like petulant children. The first treatment the patient needs is not medicine or surgery, but rather dignity and humanity.
Was this lump of jello the sum total of a human being that had lived and died? Was his or her personality still somehow trapped within? Did he or she die young of severe leukemia, or perhaps much later in life of a broken heart?
My response to this philosophical dilemma was simple. I started to learn Russian.
Finals Week:
Dr. Gantrow, a thin severe man with a Germanic adherence to punctuality, stood way at the front of the room. After he finished chewing us out for lumbering into class late looking like the sleep-deprived zombies we were, he began his lecture on the cranial nerves. He was staring to drone like the adults in the Charlie Brown cartoons. “the ninth cranial nerve, the glossopharangeal, exits from the medial side of the medullary olives….wah, wha-wah-wah-wah…”
Gantrow leaned a little bit from the weight of his own self-importance. Even his phrases took a little time in each breath to reflect on their own wisdom. Meanwhile I was trapped on four sides by the damn little blue plastic seat that was putting a nasty kink in my back. My head was lolled forward and my eyes half-closed, but I couldn’t concentrate and I couldn’t sleep.
I wondered what the students at Harvard were doing at that moment. If Sackler was flying economy, Harvard was first class. They had just returned from lunch at the gentleman’s club, and were happily digesting in leather recliners. A waitress floated from row to row with complementary drinks.
“I’ll have a bloody Mary,” a student would exclaim with a girlish giggle. The whole class would laugh politely. “How droll!”
In reality, they probably didn’t have it any better. Medical students were treated like children. We come from the top of our undergraduate or graduate education, from jobs that paid us and treated us well, to unendurable hours of lecture and lab and brute memorization.
I let my eyes unfocus and daydream about what I’d be doing if I wasn’t in medical school. Perhaps I’d be a writer: living in a sleazy dive in Istanbul, banging away on the never-finished novel on my portable computer, rubbing noses with British expats in white tweed, smoking hashish in coffee shops with walls stained brown from smoke. Maybe I’d be a special agent of the FBI, poring over computer files of suspected terrorists, coordinating with local sheriffs to find terrified kidnap victims in Kentucky, or hunting down tax evaders. I still have my FBI application on a shelf somewhere, but they’d never let me in because I smoked pot more than the maximum 15 times allowed. They even use a polygraph to make sure you don’t lie about it.
I wasn’t like the others. My parents weren’t doctors. I wasn’t interested in golf or country clubs. I never wanted to own a BMW. Why was I here? I had been in school for seven years, and I had four more years of medical school and three to seven years of residency to look forward to. While my friends from high school were running their own businesses, starting their own families, I would be slaving over books and bodies diving hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. What had I done to deserve this torture?
Was this what I really wanted to do with my life?
My mind continued to wander, falling backwards in time, looking for an answer.
I was five years old again, in preschool, hoarding the Tonka trucks and Legos in our special corner of the playroom. We played the game: what do you want to be when you grow up? Fireman, policeman, banker or lawyer? What kind of house would you have? What kind of car would you drive?
I didn't care about any of that. I wanted to be Luke Skywalker. I wanted to be a hero. This was the last of my thoughts as my eyes closed, my head lolled to the side, and the world became dark.
My world was empty and quiet once again. The bird man stepped out of the shadows. His staff clacked against the ground as he approached me. As he drew closer, I realized where I had seen him before. It was in an old book on the history of medicine. The costume was worn by seventeenth-century physicians during outbreaks of plague. They were called the 'beak doctors' because they kept sweet-smelling herbs in their long beak, which they hoped would protect them from the foul demons of disease. They walked among plague victims knowing that they could the the next victim. Back before antibiotics and anesthesia, physicians had little tools other than their willingness to help. Medicine did not come from a knife or a syringe. It came from the heart.
The Bird Man opened up his skull and removed his brain. He tucked the top of his skull in the crook of his arm, and held the brain out before me. His voice was soft but seemed to fill the world.
“Each moment has a history and a personality all to its own.
It is decisions and consequences
it is past wounds and future possibilities.”
Sitting under the metallic white light, bathing in formalin breezes that had filtered through artificial chambers down into the basement, I remember that moment and I let it free. I let it free, and I set myself free.
I was six years old, riding up the tow robe, with skiers on all sides. I was so excited! Skiing was going to be fun, skiing was going to be so great! Then I felt my leg twist, as it caught on another girl’s skis. I will always remember her face, cherubic and blank, as if she knew she were nothing more than an agent of destiny. My leg was pulled backwards, while my frozen fingers were locked on the icy steel tow cable. The pain and terror was bewildering. I was so scared I started to cry, as the sky and ground whirled. Confusion, confusion, pain and fear.
Then the paramedics arrived. They wore red and blue parkas and had big happy smiles. They picked me up and took me to the medical tent. They put my leg in a cast. They told me everything was going to be okay. They brought order from chaos, security from fear.
The experience had made its mark. From then on, perhaps not openly but in my secret heart, I knew I must become like them. I would be the only kind of superhero I knew how to be.
In the dark of night, when the innocent have fallen asleep in their beds, you will find me in the library and the laboratory, in secret rites of preparation with the old masters ready to pass on their cowls. I will learn the ways of the knife and the syringe. I will become the masked man in the white coat. Those who have no voice but the hiss of the respirator, the peaks of an EEG, they will find voice in me. I will be the cry for help finally answered.
I will become a doctor.
***
It was the night before the big neuroanatomy final and my mind was churning. I laid in bed, tossing back and forth. The facts and figures, structures and functions, lumps and folds, they all whirled in my mind without pausing to try to make sense. I was speaking in tongues to myself.
In the darkness I was flying, like in astral travel, wind whipping through my hair and nothing under my feet and I felt fantastic and free. I didn’t see the bird man anywhere, but I wasn’t concerned. I turned over and over again, soared through the free black air, without boundaries or inhibitions.
Far away I saw a planet.
As I got closer, I saw that it was an enormous ghostly skull. Through the bone, I saw the surface of an enormous brain spewing out of the spinal cord like a great grey ocean in slow-motion photography. It boiled upwards inch by inch until it sp
lashed against the white cliffs of the skull. As it pressed inward, lumps and valleys were formed.
As I swooped down towards its surface, the skull faded away to leave the brain exposed. Flashing across the hills and valleys like a bird over treetops, I saw flickering images.
Those visions were memories of my life, playing like disembodied TV sets…shouting To Ho Ka Mi Eh Mi Ta Me at the top of my lungs, swinging a blue-painted iron bell filled with steel bearings louder than God, together with fifteen other white-clad priests, feeling my legs on fire but praying the Universe would speak to me…getting propositioned by a soft skinned hard edged Japanese hooker in a crowded bar on the seventh floor of a thin building like a bacon strip reaching for the Kyoto skyline…riding with the head paramedic Linda in the back of the ambulance bumping over rocks at seventy miles an hour with a kid on the stretcher who looked like he was made of white sticks who said he drunk eighty beers, shouting at Linda “you stupid bitch you whore you fucking whore let me go,” so she slammed a nasotrachael tube into the kid’s nose and he screamed and taped an oxygen mask to his face so that he couldn’t shout at her anymore…baring my soul to a computer and a grimy grey screen in a one-room apartment next to Hongdae University at six thirty in the morning while clown-car Bongo trucks delivered oranges and rice and the loudspeakers shouted government propaganda and sang patriotic songs in Korean while I was waiting for my fiancee to come home so we could make love and plans for the future …flying over the handlebars of my beloved Yamaha at forty miles an hour in the rain with the pavement rolling like a grindstone under me and not being scared but thinking ‘oh, shit’…getting the acceptance letter from Sackler and screaming to myself ‘I finally did it I finally got into medical school’…
I flew past the memories to an unformed section of brain. This was reserved for medical school. It was flat and featureless, but fertile with potential. A host of experiences waiting to be molded. To mold me. Let the tests come, I thought with a rush of freedom. Let the long nights and ungrateful patients and big loans and bad coffee come. I am ready.
-e2k
Eric Michael Schultz studied medicine at the University of Tel Aviv. He is a physician who teaches and works in medically-underserved areas around the country. Before medical school he had been a martial arts instructor, ESL teacher, and ambulance jockey. He believes health care is a human right.
https://erscutmonkey.blogspot.com
Tiffany Kamerman is currently a doctor working in Pediatrics. She attended Savannah College of Art & Design before pursuing her career in medicine, and she continues her passion for art through her work in illustration and comic book art.
https://tiffanykamerman.blogspot.com
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