Let me set a scene (nothing medical): wheat shaved to stubble and lathered with snow, the occasional pimple of a farmhouse—both black, collapsing and white, new—and the weary grid roads that literally crisscross the Canadian prairies. While I write this, I’m listening to the shhh of gravel bouncing against the side of the family van; we’re driving back home after a visit to my dad’s farm—the first time I’ve seen him in almost a year. It’s a Christmas tradition nearly two decades old.
Next to me is a 1957 copy of an 1896 book, “Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine” (with a very long subtitle) that I borrowed from my dad’s library because it sparked a number of interesting conversations during our visit (1). He’s a physician, and one of my original inspirations to apply to Medicine. So naturally, I hear all kinds of medical stories whenever we talk. I had the new joy this holiday, though, of being able to reciprocate.
More than that, actually. This new year will mark one year of internship, the first year of my actually “doing Medicine” in any real sense. As I hope many readers here appreciate, though, my clerkship doesn’t always feel like doing anything “real.” Instead, I’m still just a puppy-dog student panting along behind my residents. But when Dad started telling his stories yesterday, I was able to turn it into a conversation. I shared stories from the wards, from the clinic, and from the OR. He asked me about how I approached celiac disease and we talked about how what I’d been taught differed from his own education. We compared infections he saw in Ontario, where he mostly works now, to those I’ve seen in Saskatchewan. And above all, with every one of his stories I was able to identify with, I felt more like maybe I had done something this past year, and maybe I was a step closer to being a doctor.
There’s no real moral to this story, and if this seems like just a repeat of a few of my other “revelations,” it’s because I’ve been walking a Kubler-Rossesque journey as I approach the great and terrible reality of being Doctor Fowler. Acceptance is an unexpected stocking stuffer.
1. Gould, George M., and Pyle, Walter L, Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine: Being an Encyclopedic Collection of Rare and Extraordinary Cases, and of the Most Striking Instances of Abnormality in All Branches of Medicine and Surgery, Derived from an Exhaustive Research of Medical Literature from Its Origin to the Present Day, Abstracted, Classified, Annotated, and Indexed,” Bell Publishing Company, New York, NY, 1896.
