Metaphors and Medicine (Year II): Chapter 1

 Dear Self,

A year ago, you had hoped I would write, write, write my way through my life until I found myself. You had hoped I would find home, a home that wouldn’t leave me having to choose between here and there. You hoped I would find comfort in my “feel too much and all at once” self.

I found that. All of that. I wrote about finding the stories on the walls and OR rooms in Nablus this summer, listening to the living stories through the streets of Ramallah, holding the little kiddo's hand as he woke up looking for his mother, listening to his mother tell me everything that the news did not tell me about the beauty, rather than destruction, of life in Gaza.  My “feel too much” self became my identity, shamelessly, my first and only skin. There was no replacement. I did not fight the stories anymore.

My biggest fear has been to lose you. And I abandoned you believing that this was what I had to do to survive like everyone else around me. The truth is not everyone has a self like you that they need to survive. Not everyone has stories brewing inside of them that they push away. Not everyone wakes up to images of home and wishes they could close their eyes again and wake up somewhere else. Not everyone wakes up to the smell of their flashback, to a place others wish to escape, but for you is your escape. It is where you found yourself, where you settled into your own, where you accepted exactly who you are.

Home is where you accepted exactly who you are.

So what has made me come looking for you again?

 This person who wakes up doing medicine and only medicine everyday, this is not who I am. This is not who I ever ever in my whole life aspired or aspire to be. I am in medicine to understand medicine through the stories presented to me, and the truth is that lately there have not been as many stories. On top of that, I have my doubts about whether or not I deserve to spend time on the stories, that perhaps I need to focus on doing medicine everyday so that I can succeed in medicine. And maybe that part is true, I am succeeding at the medicine part, but I am losing my personhood. I have forgotten the heart that beat for this path. I have forgotten that I am a storyteller first. I have said more than a few times in last two weeks that perhaps I should have studied English, and it’s crazy to say that I believe I meant it. It’s because I’ve lost the stories, and I’ve turned to waking up and going to bed to medicine.

In the last few days, my heart has been craving a larger space to expand, to tell longer stories again that are not limited to a word count. I believe that in order to authentically share how I am fighting to maintain my personhood in medicine, I must allow myself to do that limit-free, not limited by whether or not I have a photo to share with my story so I can post it, whether or not I can condense it all down to the word count the platform allows us to have.

Since the beginning of my medical pursuit, I have had to push past the limits that medicine places on us as students first compelled to be the "standard" pre-med student with a science major. I pushed past that limit and spent four years studying stories and juggling time between enzymatic reactions and experiments in organic chemistry lab with writing analytic papers on post-colonialism and writing collections of poetry. I wrote a thesis on my Palestinian-American identity while facing the clash of my identity as an English major receiving rejection after rejection from medical schools (there are posts on here and on Instagram all about this if you're new here :)

Then upon entering medical school, there was a new clash. I proved that I could make it, even as someone who is more inclined to the written arts by believing within my core that storytelling was an essential part of how I understood medicine and the lens with which I understood my surroundings with. I combated my "feel everything and all at once" self and wrote, wrote, and wrote my way through my first year until I could see how everything I felt was just part of this lens, part of how I soaked in my journey, how I found something significant in each day, how I shaped myself into the physician I imaged myself being.

To those of you who have been following me along this journey, you know that my path has been anything but traditional. Medicine was not a choice; it was a calling. And as long as I can protect myself from falling into the trap of the everyday routine, I am able to keep the belief in this calling alive. I believe that words are a way for me to capture why I have been called to this, and stories serve as the way that I understand the people I work with and care for.

So, it's time for longer stories again.

Here's one:

I've been thinking of a patient I met a few months ago. She is a songwriter, who used to sing but could not longer do so due to her chronic illness. For the privacy of the patient, I am going to keep the details anonymous. I did not learn she was a songwriter until minutes into the encounter when after she told the physician how her symptoms were doing on morning rounds, she suddenly asked, "Doc, when can I go back to the studio?"

I remember looking at this young patient in the hospital bed and thinking of her the way we think of anyone we see in a bed: they are ill, they are unwell, they are limited here and in this space. But that moment was one of many that taught me that there is a life outside of these walls, and she was the only person who could fight for herself to be able to go back to that life.

Not all patients can. I have been with patients who will probably never speak again, who may never wake up again. I have been around parents who are still coming to terms with that reality, mentally and emotionally adjusting to the new life that their child now has, and as a result, the new life they as parents have.

This patient was a songwriter, and she was not going to let a diagnosis or another hospitalization tell her otherwise. When she could not sing anymore, she took to just writing. She was resilient. I remember spending the rest of our time with her thinking of her in her studio, how it must feel each time she returns after so many tell her this may be the time that she will finally have to give up the writing part as well.

I think of us as medical students, turning into robots that stare at laptop screens and memorize one slide of information after the other. We drill flash cards of information, diseases that people live with. I complain about the memorization, but there are people complaining about living with the exact thing I am struggling simply to learn. I convinced myself over the last few months that academics had to take priority to the point where I couldn't have the break I needed to write stories, even though it has always been what I needed. My stumble in academics has been like my hospitalization that has gone on too long, but I haven't fought for myself to get back into my studio, my temple, my sanctuary. There is a point where that becomes enough, where the excuses aren't enough. If this resilient human battling chronic illness can fight for her sanctuary, then why shouldn't I?

"When can I go back to the studio?" she asked, pausing to take a breath from the oxygen mask that sat in her hand, as though the physician hadn't just spewed results that could implicate that.

He smiled at her, shrugged his shoulders and said, "When you feel ready, we'll get you back in there."