Psychic Travels

So it turns out I'm not the first person to want to leave medicine!  Or even to write about it!  Wayyyyyyyyy back in 1988 (yes, that's sarcasm, although when I do the math, it's been 24 years and that makes me feel old), Michael Crichton (yes, him again) wrote a book called Travels. In it, he describes his extensive travels around the globe, mostly to lesser-trodden locales.  He details the self-insight and life lessons each journey teaches him, but he begins the book with a description of his four years in medical school. 

This book was recommended to me by my wonderful career-change coach, and at first I wasn't sure why.  Sure, I love to travel and MC has traveled to some amazing places.  He also describes his journeys on the spiritual plane - from psychic readings to astral projection to meditating in the desert, talking to a cactus for two weeks!  Initially, I wasn't really sure why he chose to begin his book with his med school days, since it doesn't really match up with the rest of the book, but he eventually spells it out - if he hadn't changed careers, if he had stayed in medicine, he might not have been forced into the sort of change that lays the track for all kinds of other life-changing experiences. 

MC started out as an English major, but found the English department at Harvard to be less than pleasant.  He switched to anthropology, and took some premed courses, "just in case".  He found the pre-med world to be quite different from the rest of Harvard, where people were less caught up in grades, and more eager for the learning experience in general.  In pre-med courses, he stepped "into a different world - nasty and competitive".  People would sabotage their classmates without a second thought - we called those people "gunners" by the time I went to med school.  No thought or consideration for anything but their own success.

He makes a couple comments that I found laugh-out-loud funny.  The first, regarding the gunners who gave out wrong answers to classmates who asked for help in his chemistry class and who sabotaged his lab experiments so he would start fires: "I was uncomfortable with the hostile and paranoid attitude this course demanded for success.  I thought that a humane profession like medicine ought to encourage other values in its candidates.  But nobody was asking my opinion."  How could I have found this LOL-funny?  Because it's true...  A quarter of a century later, medicine is still encouraging hostile, inhumane behaviour.  Not overtly, of course, and I do believe that things have improved.  My medical school had very few gunners, and overall was a pretty supportive place.  We were encouraged to explore our humanity, and we even had a humanities requirement in the curriculum (my favorite course - Red Flag #382 for my clinical career).  But I believe that the training, particularly by the time one gets to residency, beats most, if not all, of the humanity out of one. MC describes, "This... seemed more like hazing, like a professional initiation, than education."  I had to hunker down to get through it, and that hunkering down necessitated a complete absence of work on my inner self and created a version of myself that I really didn't like.

He continues, "I got through it as best I could.  I imagined medicine to be a caring profession, and a scientific one as well.  It was so fast-moving that its practitioners could not afford to be dogmatic; they would be flexible and open-minded."  Ha, ha.  Very funny, MC.  I am priveleged to know a lot of physicians who are wonderful people, caring as well as scientifically smart.  But I also know a lot of the other kind...  I will say that I believe that med schools today are trying to create more of the former, but unfortunately the profession does attract a fair number of the latter.  MC elaborates, "I learned that the best doctors found a middle position where they were neither overwhelmed by their feelings nor estranged from them.  That was the most difficult position of all, and the precise balance - neither too detached nor too caring - was something few learned...
 "It was certainly interesting work, and there was no doubt that you were doing something worthwhile with your life, helping sick people." This is true.  Medicine was, and is, an incredibly worthwhile profession, and it can be a very rewarding one as well. 

He goes on to tell some anecdotes about his pre-clinical and clinical training.  He explores the development of the gallows humor that anyone who deals with illness and death on a daily basis develops to some extent.  He describes the apalling behaviour of residents and attendings with whom he interacts, and his struggles with some patients.  He develops a theory of illness that requires that people take ownership of and responsibility for their mental and physical health.  He quits medicine.

MC tried four different times to quit medical school.  At the time, he was required to meet with a psychiatrist before he could quit.  The psychiatrist talked him into continuing every time, basically telling him he hadn't gotten yet to the part he wouldn't hate.  The psychiatrist did this each of the first three years of med school, then finally gave up the ghost, saying "I thought you would quit in the end".  MC finished out his four years, then quit medicine before ever becoming licensed or practicing.  Here's where my experience differed.  I actually enjoyed the classroom aspect of medical school, and I enjoyed many of my clinical rotations.  I still had (a little) time to devote to outside pursuits (reading, dancing).  The rotations I didn't enjoy were the ones that impinged the most on my outside life, or that were extremely stressful.  Red Flag #936. 

Now, MC had a backup.  He was already making money as an author during medical school.  He quit to become a writer, and he was already somewhat established by the time he gave up medicine.  He also had a tool with which to meet the naysayers when he publicized his decision to quit medicine.  "In quitting, I was following my instincts; I was doing what I really wanted to do.  But most people saw only that I was giving up a lot of prestige...They admired my determination, but they thought I was pretty unrealistic."  Hmmmm, sounds familiar.  MC, though, had written a little thing called The Andromeda Strain which was about to become a movie.  Once it was known he was a successful writer, people got off his back.  "All the doctors and residents who had shunned me became suddenly interested in me."

I have no Andromeda Strain in my back pocket.  I've got this blog, I'm working on a website, and I'm doing some medical editing and writing on a freelance basis.  My future best-seller of a book (think positive!) is still a mass of unorganized, unedited words on my computer.  But I do have one thing in common with Dr. Crichton:  I am following my instincts and walking away from an unhappy life, forward into the great unknown.  Cheers!