Privilege

Today I was talking to one of the physicians who just recently started working in the lab and he was telling me how difficult it was to switch back from clinical medicine to bench work (he's been helping me with some experiments, well, trying; after failing with something pretty simple 3 times in a row, I started getting worried that I had given him the wrong protocol or bad reagents, so I did the experiment myself and it worked perfectly). This started me thinking about the two sides of medicine. There is science to medicine - I'd like to believe that I know a thing or two about that - and then there is art to medicine. For me I imagine it's going to be difficult to make the switch from thinking about the science all the time to considering the human element before all others.

Doctors are present at some defining moments of our lives. They are there when we enter this world. They are there in some of our most challenging moments, we trust them with some of our biggest secrets, worries, anxieties and then they sometimes even have the privilege to be there when we leave this life. To do all of this with humble confidence and grace must be incredibly difficult. I am only at the very beginning of my journey into this world but I can already tell. Just a couple of humbling experiences showed me recently.

In the past few weeks I have seen an increasing number of cadavers. Dead bodies. Prior to applying to medical school, I had only seen one dead person. It's something I have mentioned here a couple of times before. It was my first very real confrontation, so to speak, with mortality. And then came the interviews. It started with an anatomy lab with many bodies laying in bags, all covered up, the rancid smell of formaldehyde, body parts floating in glass jars. The next interview I went on, they unzipped one of the bags. That particular school had an interesting anatomical donation policy. All of the bodies used by medical students in all anatomy labs are donated by people for this particular reason, to be dissected. At some schools, the donors become anonymous, while at a few other ones, they keep their names and identities. That's how Hofstra is. "Our body" that day was William, a 48-year old man who had died of lung cancer. He looked mostly human, not yet dissected to the bone, just an open chest to expose the diseased parts. A current student reached in and held up the heart, then one lung to show us. He kept calling the "body" by his name. William. He said it was important for him to be able to put a name to the body, to relate to "it", to be able to find the human element even in the anatomy lab. Some people think this is quite morbid. I tend to agree with him. William made a very generous donation to education and for this, we should thank him and all other donors - live or dead - every single day. Even in death, you can try to find the human element.

Since my visit to Hofstra, I have seen several other cadavers - all anonymous - which were dissected to a much larger extent. It did not freak me out. Which is good. I saw a pair of students earlier this week studying the most minute parts of the facial structures behind the mandible. Nerve fibers, tiny blood vessels exposed, muscle being cut away, just a skeleton left basically. The cadaver had no name, no age. It was just an instrument. A very different experience.

And so appropriately, fitting perfectly into the never ending cycle of human life, after being confronted with death and mortality, I was offered a miraculous glimpse into the beginnings of life yesterday. My friend and colleague had a beautiful baby girl 2 days ago. We had followed her pregnancy from the very beginning, knew about every doctor's appointment, ultrasound, saw pictures of what looked like a bean, to fantastic 3D images of tiny feet and a perfect little button nose. We touched the bump, watched and felt as it moved, debated baby names around the lunch table and when Kata was finally born, we went to the hospital to welcome her to this world. This was my very first time at a maternity ward. Already, the sight of the nursery with a handful of tiny little screaming creatures in their little cribs made me tear up. They looked like burritos to me, all wrapped up in the same hospital issued blanket, only the heads sticking out on one end. Little Kata is precious, so soft, almost unrealistically tiny. On her first full day of life, she already had the appetite of a grownup. Her big sister held up a hand to stroke her tiny little head. I just stood there, not knowing what to do what to say. All I could think of was that to be part of this process, life, to be there when it starts, and to be there, maybe just one floor down in the hospital, when it ends, is truly the biggest privilege I can hope for.