Tattoos in medicine

| What tattoo do you want and where would you put it?

To add to my own collection, I would get Mulan’s sword with the Cinderella’s “have courage and be kind” written along the blade. On my left bicep. A dedication to the two princesses I admired as a child. The dichotomy within myself to be drawn to the loyalty and boldness of Mulan and the compassion and demureness of Cinderella. Both have immeasurable strength, and I want a reminder that as a child I knew a strong woman can be all these things and more.

When I think about tattoos in the medical field, I recall the quick widening of the eyes my medical school interviewer gave when he spotted my tattoo. I had forgotten to hide it that day, and 3 months later I was waitlisted. Are the two instances connected? Probably not. But the medical field is notoriously conservative. In its technology, its willingness to change, its social norms and hierarchies. The field has been evolving, and patients don’t really care much about our conservatism (or lack thereof). So, what will it take for our own to finally move forward?

Self-expression is hard in medical school. We’re taught what to think, how to think, how to talk, and how to present ourselves to patients and peers. We all wear scrubs to wash out our identities. Add in the masks, and we’re nothing but brains attached to bodies. Tattoos are beautiful forms of cultural and individual self-expression. They’re visual identifiers of stories that hide invisibly in our heads. If you’ve only got one body and one life, I say don’t be the one to limit your self-expression; the field will already do enough of that.

The First Year of College

My freshman year of college officially ended one week ago, along with my ties to the BS/MD program.

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October 2014: The BS in BS/MD

I know I said I wouldn’t do this, but it’s time for the truth to come out.

I think these kinds of programs are shit.

How on earth could a 17 year old be qualified to become a doctor?

Yes, I know, I’m in one of these shit programs. And I’ve felt terrible about it because I know I’m not going to be nearly as experienced as the 25 year olds I’ll be surrounded by when I’m a meek 20 years old.

Tell me, do you want a 28 year old doctor? What kind of people trust a 28 year old with their lives? Most of the people I will treat will be older than me, and odds are, much more intelligent that I will be.

Wannabe doctors like me are grateful for such programs, but if I actually think about it, it’s such a cop-out.

And think about the personality of a doctor. You want someone who is trusting, non-judgmental, sympathetic and compassionate. But at the same time, you want someone determined, knowledgable, and tough. Not someone who will compare your SAT scores and then make bets to see who will get kicked out of the program for not meeting the grade requirements (yes, this has happened).

This has been building up for quite a while now, so it may seem like I’m exploding in a ball of anger. I’ve just been trying to hold myself back, seeing if there’s any way to justify what I’m doing. Honestly, I cannot.

And so, I am here to say that I am dropping out of the BS/MD program.

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I mentioned this post “The BS in BS/MD” in my previous post, and I said it was too bitter to publish. I still think it’s a bit uncalled for, but I found it worth publishing for two reasons.

1. According to WordPress, I wrote this 8 months ago. Meaning I wrote this back in October, and I haven’t touched it since.  I was waiting for the day I would officially drop out and publish it then, but the fact that it was fully written by my second month of college is a bit painful.

2. I would never, ever write this today, 8 months later. These are not the reasons I am transferring. All of the facts that I had written about were true. I would have been a 20 year old medical student, a 24 year old doctor, and a 28 year old doctor who could practice medicine. There were kids in my program who made bets about who would get kicked out first. Funny enough, I appear to the be the first person to leave the program (not get kicked out of course, far from it). But my reasons are so much more developed than this that I’m glad I never found this draft again until a few weeks ago.

It feels silly to talk about that first year of college, and the “ups and downs” and the “long-lasting memories” and the “stories to look back on and laugh about” and the “late night munchies.” None of that happened to me.

But freshman year is a big year for anyone, regardless of the above experiences. You learn to be independent. You learn to make mistakes. You learn that you know absolutely nothing about the world and yourself. But that’s okay. Maybe you learn that it’s okay? The only thing I know for sure is that I don’t know anything.

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I wish I had written earlier, but it’s been a crazy whirlwind of celebrating the summer high-school style (red cups and everything) and family travels to…

Stockholm! And now en route to Copenhagen, taking advantage of the abundance of wifi.

Stockholm – into Gamla Stan

The fate of this blog is up in the air, but I think it still has a few moments left in it.

Why do I feel guilty about leaving medicine?

What do you want to do with your life?

This question used to be so easy to answer. Go to college and then become a doctor. Done and done. I’d find a husband along the way and have a beautiful family after that, and we’d all live happily ever after. OBVIOUSLY.

Well, ignorance is bliss.

What a mess I have gotten myself into.

Just the thought of exiting my program gives me the guilt sweats. (Are those a thing or just my body being weird? I just know that I’d know the answer to that if I were to stay in medicine.) It feels as though I’m telling myself to quit medical school and that I can always “re-apply” when “I’m ready.”

http://www.someecards.com/usercards/viewcard/MjAxMi1mYTA1ODE4MDE5MDk0Nzdm

It feels like I’m betraying my family, my younger, ambitious self, my community, my future role as a person who helps people. I’m betraying all those people who thought our family was the perfect doctor family. I’m betraying my friends who believed that I would be a great doctor. I’m betraying my name, even my blog. But if anything, I’m betraying my pre-med peers. I feel most guilty that I stole this spot in the program from someone who wanted this path much more than I did, and leaving won’t give it back to the person who deserved it. So for that, I’m truly sorry.

The only reason people seem to be okay with me leaving this program is when I say, “I don’t want to do medicine anymore.” Because I don’t have another career path in mind, it’s the only thing I can say. But that is an outright, blatant lie. I don’t think I’ve made eye contact with anyone when I say that phrase.

I never saw how a person wouldn’t want to be a doctor. Just like I don’t understand how a person doesn’t like psychology. Do people out there exist? Clearly not everyone is a doctor and not everyone is a psychology major, but medicine is definitely a lucrative, highly-respected career path, so how can I turn it down if it’s being handed to me on a silver platter? Just take it.

When I took my career assessment, I discovered that I was best suited for things like communications, counseling, education, and health care. Health care. And right in front of the career counselor, I started panicking out loud. What am I doing? It says health care right here. It says physician. Why can’t I just stick with it? So many other people just go with it and they don’t make a big deal out of this, so why am I? And my career counselor said perhaps what I believe is most important for everyone to know: because that’s who you are.

Left: MBTI – INFJ; Right: Strong interest inventory – Artistic, Social, Investigative, Enterprising, Realistic, Conventional

He yelled it in my ear multiple times before I could finally get the message past my panic attack, but suddenly it was clear. I’m the type of person to take the reflective journey, and I have to do it in order to feel confident and secure with my life. Some people don’t need to do it, and that’s ok. But you have to stay true to yourself because this is your life. Just because everyone else is on the same path doesn’t mean you have to be on it too.

You have to do what you believe is right for you, and you can’t just compare yourself to other people and how they react or manage their problems. You can emulate how your heroes became successful, get advice from your peers on how they got out of that rut, but it will only last for so long. So while I do feel guilty about leaving medicine, I realize that I’m just taking a break to do what I need to do. And some people might never understand it, but I trust myself enough to know that I’m doing the right thing. (…right?)

The crash course class on 7-year BS/MD

Last quarter I took a BS/MD class; a class just for us “special” kids on this very specific path to medicine. I doubt every program has this, but it was one of the most eye-opening and mind-boggling classes I’ve ever taken. Keep in mind, while this class was convincing us that our path to medicine is permanent and exciting, I was convincing myself to step back from medicine and transfer out.

Week 1: Intros

We were introduced to the unique set-up of this “course,” and the informative sessions we were about to have on residencies, MCATs, rotations, and all the exams that made up the rest of our lives. At end, we were all asked to describe our future intentions for residency. The majority were surgery and emergency medicine; no one dared to say primary care. I was one of two in a class of 20 that didn’t know yet, or was at least willing to admit it. But it was at this moment that I realized applying to transfer was the right move.

Week 2: Feedback

For some reason, people think we’re extra smart, extra special. We’re not. But that didn’t stop the 50 minute session of giving feedback on the biology curriculum. Because we’re the best people to get this feedback from, right? And that’s clearly very useful for my future. So far this class seemed pointless.

Week 3: MCATs

This time it was 50 minutes of MCATs talk. Quite a disaster. Everyone was pretty shaken up by it, especially by the fact that no one knows how hard the new MCAT is going to be. We don’t have a minimum, an average, or really any idea on what’s good and what’s not. They gave us as much info as I could’ve gotten from the website. They might as well have said, “Brace yourselves and take these brochures.”

[www.aamc.org] 6 hours, really?

Week 4: Medical Ethics

For once this class seemed more interesting and less daunting. Tell me, what do you think about physician-assisted suicide? It was pretty riveting actually, and it reminded me of the great responsibilities doctors have in our society.

Week 5: Research

This was actually a pretty truthful, discouraging talk about how sometimes you can pour all your time, money, and life into research and end up with no results. But they managed to throw in the fact that the M.D. Ph.D. program offers a full scholarship, so I guess it didn’t discourage all of us.

Week 6: Residencies

This was probably the week I felt the most lost. Everyone already knew so much about how residencies worked, calculated how long it would take for them to do their specialty, and even considered how to squeeze in more research. Meanwhile, I was just sitting there wondering if Grey’s Anatomy was at all an accurate depiction. The residency director made medicine sound so fulfilling and worthwhile, especially at the affiliated medical school; it was like slicing my brain in half. Maybe I do want to be a doctor, and if it’s so great here why would I leave? But at the same time, this proved just how ignorant I was at 16 about the field of medicine when I made the decision to apply.

[www.huffingtonpost.com]

Week 7: Professionalism

This was a long talk about how important it is to be a professional when you’re a professional. And how they expected us to behave this way at 18 years old.

Week 8: “Cultural Passport”

They tried to make sure we still did college-kid things even though “we’re not the typical college kid.”

Week 9: Case learning

We got to pretend to be doctors, essentially. The professors at the medical school came in and gave us a case. With our extremely basic knowledge of biology, we had to figure out what was wrong and discover all the things we could learn from this case. It was a method of teaching at the medical school: teach by cases and develop important learning objectives from these cases. The terrifying part was that it was fun. I enjoyed it immensely. But then that familiar nervous pit dropped in my stomach again: what if this is what I really want to do?

A glimpse at what they provided: a description of the case, a sheet with the physical exam results, a concept map that would normally be drawn during class time, and learning objectives that were addressed in this case.

Week 10: Informational Interviews

This was the most revealing part of the class, as I caught a glimpse of what my life would be like in 2021. We each interviewed a 4th year medical student, and it was relieving to know that mine had taken a gap year and had no intentions of pursuing medicine when she was a freshman in college. So basically, she was the opposite of me. But it was nice to hear that even if I do transfer, there’s a chance I could still successfully become a doctor if I wanted to. The most interesting thing is the 4th year med students who were BS/MD students all said the same thing about their experience in these programs: “I’d advise others not to take this path, but if I were to go back and do it again, I wouldn’t change a thing.”

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I think that last quotation pretty much sums up how I feel. Except this time, I am changing it (well, maybe). But it explains why this decision is so difficult to do choose.

Food Truck Friday: Korean food and career doubts

It’s only been a week and I already missed the abundance of Asian food.

Beef bulgogi with udon noodle stir fry.

There were some veggies in it too like a piece of broccoli, mushrooms, onions, carrots, the usual. I was expecting it to be like my pho experience, but I was delighted (and sort of pained) by the spiciness, which was necessary after such brutal weather this past week.

On a side note, bulgogi is actually one of the top 50 most delicious foods in the world, a spot it rightfully deserves. This list (although 4 years old already) is actually quite amazing and a good mental note to keep when venturing into different cuisines.

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So…classes are pretty rough. Pushing yourself to take 6 classes sounds like an ambitious, “I can do it!” kind of thing, but seriously, don’t do it if you don’t have to. And technically I don’t have to, but the only class I’d be able to drop is psychology, and so far it’s my favorite (next to English).

My least favorite is perhaps the class especially just for the BS/MD program, where we get to discuss MCATs, residencies, and ethics. “Because [we] are not moving at the average pace, [we] are way ahead of our time so [we] need to be on top of our game.” What I find is the perfect timing of taking this class, run by my advisor, right after I made an appointment to tell her that I’m applying to transfer and considering pursuing a different career.

“BUT WAIT, what about that whole spiel on still becoming a doctor?”

The whole point of me transferring is to explore my options. Of course I feel like medicine is in my roots, but what about all the other things I was supposed to learn during my freshman year of college? That’s what I’m looking for. I might end up in medicine again, but maybe I’ll finally know it’s not just because I have genetic predisposition for it. I’m just not cut out for this 7-year thing, even if I want to do medicine. It’s really not for every pre-med out there. But I’ll admit that the fact that my name is M.D. and I titled this blog as such is influencing my choices. It’s the little things.

I once said that medicine is the final destination, but the journey is filled with winding roads, wrong turns, and messed up directions. If anything, this is just a turn off the paved shortcut into the grassy scenic route. I might get lost, but maybe I’ll forge my own path. If you don’t get off the guided path, you might miss an extraordinary encounter with a family of deer or an untouched meadow painted with flowers. You might get mauled by a bear too, but ideally you’re smarter than that. This is why I want to transfer.

I know it sounds naive, idealistic, and just plain old stupid, which is why I think I should stay.

I feel like I need to justify my reasons for transferring much more than I do with staying, but I want to leave. I dream about it in my free time. But that’s why I decided to at least apply. Who knows what will happen afterward? As well thought out as it sounds, it’s really just a procrastination strategy.

Why I still want to be a doctor

As I have discussed many times before, I often question whether or not I want to stay in this program. There is still no answer to this question, but there is an answer to the most important question: Do I still want to be a doctor?

There was a period of time after I got my series of college rejections and waitlists that I decidedly no longer wanted to become a doctor. Clearly, it didn’t look like I was cut out for it. (Yes, I did get into this program, which implies the exact opposite of what I was thinking, but my logic was so off during that time because rejections hurts. And it plays with your emotions.) I could barely get into college; how was I supposed to get into medical school? And then residency? And then take care of people’s entire lives?!?!

[pixgood.com] The balance in the symbol of medicine is enough.

The overwhelming reality of my aspirations suddenly hit me. In all my essays for college, I wrote about this idealistic medical career because it was the perfect balance of art and science, humanities and math, emotion and logic, sympathy and grit. It was nicely wrapped in a box with a ribbon tied in a bow at the top. But that’s not real, and I even knew it. I just didn’t want to think about it.

After my melancholy disaster of self-pity, I fantasized about becoming a writer. What kind of writer? Well, clearly not a novelist because creative writing is certainly not my strong point. Probably not a journalist because I don’t have a strong enough stance on anything. So then what? I liked blogging. What kind of job would that get me? I started picturing myself as a writer in a social magazine or the Huffington post. They’re bloggers, essentially (although there are some hard-hitting pieces on the Huff Post).

Halfway through fall term, I found a student organization on campus called HerCampus , which I had been following the weeks coming into college. I thought it was fun to read, and I thought I’d give it a shot because sometimes their articles were featured on the Huffington Post. I thought people just wrote about fun things and they’d be happy all the time! What a much less stressful life than being a doctor, huh?

When I showed up to the first meeting, I knew immediately I didn’t belong. I felt it. They started talking about article ideas for Halloween and needed someone to claim the DIY costume article. The whole time I felt my face get hot and my mind melt into a puddle. I wasn’t supposed to be in this world.

I spent so much time criticizing myself and scolding myself for my numerous essays about medicine, hospitals, helping people; I always tell myself that that was the reason I didn’t get in. But it’s who I am.

[Wikipedia] It’s really just a movie about leukemia.

Medicine is my culture. Most of the time I feel like I don’t have a heritage I belong to. I’m not the full blown American and I’m far from being a cultured Chinese. But medicine is somewhere I belong. I used forceps before tweezers, learned about Varicella before the chicken pox. I grew up with vaccines in the same refrigerator drawer as the cheese. At age 5, I watched the Jimmy Neutron movie as a metaphor for leukemia, once my Dad explained how the rampant children without parents are the cancer cells in the bone marrow. This was my life. To imagine it otherwise is asking me to change my entire self.

Sometimes I still think I can’t make it. I hear my sister say all these new medical terms, my parents lauding her school’s new outpatient center, and I sit in the corner barely hanging onto the conversation and looking pitifully into my future at a once bankrupt medical school. (This was my Thanksgiving break, actually). And I think there’s no way I could be a doctor.

Sometimes I cringe a little at the thought of stabbing someone with a needle, and I think there’s no way I could be a doctor.

Sometimes I’m indecisive in what I’m going to eat in the dining hall, and I think there’s no way I could be a doctor.

Sometimes I get unusually tired after 6 hours of sleep, and I think there’s no way I could be a doctor.

Sometimes I forget the common name of 2-hydroxypropanoic acid and feel like an idiot, and I think there’s no way I could be a doctor.

But thing is, I still want it, and I’m still going after it because I know it’s who I am.

For the doctors out there or the future doctors, why medicine?

opensource.com- Will reading your doctor’s notes make you healthier?- Flickr