A Glimpse into Medicine as a Second Career

Medicine is a dichotomous career.  It is not built for the faint of heart.  It is demanding and rewarding.  It pushes the human spirit to the limit, yet shows its softer side in patient-centered care and the respect for human dignity.  It humbles the arrogant and empowers the timid.  It tells those brave enough to pursue it that as a doctor, you can beat this disease while at the same time showing its learners that the complexities of disease can defeat them, despite the greatest of intentions and treatments.

Medicine is a second career for me.  I am a wife and mother of two children. I am a medical student, which still sounds foreign. I was a speech pathologist in acute care for 16 years prior to this endeavor.  To say that I saw myself here at the age of 45 leaving behind a successful career, with a husband and two kids in tow would be a laughable “you’re kidding, right?” scenario, to put it mildly.  But a seed was planted, and I took a chance, that just maybe I could offer something not only through previous work experience, but through life experience. The adjustment was painful. After all, it had been 20 years since I’d finished graduate school. The days of handwritten tests and assignments and using a computer in a library for the odd assignment were long over. My computer literacy skills had not been kind to me with age, and I found myself asking for help on day 1 merely to open my schedule and to simply find a lecture. How could I ever hope to survive my first week at this rate, I thought.  Completing assignments and learning how to submit them seemed like insurmountable tasks. I found medicine to be an immersive bubble, somehow insulated from life at home. Meanwhile, the demands of home didn’t stop. The extracurricular activities of my children, getting home in time to make supper, fundraising efforts at schools, being there for their tears and triumphs, and trying to maintain a healthy marriage constantly beckoned for me. Many days are riddled with guilt and worry for my family followed by a healthy dose of second-guessing how and why I chose to tackle the challenge of medicine at my age.

I counter that with the recognition that it is a true privilege to be accepted into medicine. Of course, there are the obvious accolades that come with a high GPA, MCAT, and interview performance. However, to use that as the sole criteria for this privilege is short-sighted.  One can take all the lecture hours you sat through or didn’t, all the clinical skills sessions, the perpetual feeling of discomfort moving from one foreign situation to the next that one just somehow gets used to, all the examinations to include the OSCEs (Objective Structured Clinical Examination), and the endless hours studying and total them up and their sum would not yet even begin to meet the goal.  That goal being one’s ability to serve patients. As a medical student, we are taught this early on. On numerous occasions. But until you actually interact with a patient, one cannot fully understand. It truly is about the privilege of the patient allowing us to participate in their care, the honor of hearing their stories. Each patient has one. The trust they place in us. The hope. The responsibility. It is worth one’s while to learn early on that it is the patients that teach us as doctors, not us that teach the patients. A rich and beautiful irony for any health care professional.

There really isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t feel old in my class. I feel like a fish out of water in the classroom. I expected that. I regularly walk a fine line, with one foot in the gigantism of medicine and one foot out, hoping it doesn’t swallow me up only to spit me back out. What I didn’t expect was how I’d be embraced by students whom I am proud and honored to call my peers. There have been many times that I’ve stumbled along the way and questioned the journey that I’m on, only to be helped up and offered kind words and actions of encouragement along the way. A situation that comes to mind shortly after starting my first year was one where I felt generally overwhelmed and lost. I’m in over my head, I thought. Unable to find faculty to speak with, it was my anatomy dissection group that picked me up, classmates that I’d known but a few short weeks. “Don’t quit. You can’t quit.  You are here for a reason.” A mantra that I hold closely and will continue to do so into clerkship.

I still remain hopeful that my previous work and life experience will be an asset during my clerkship years.  However, I relish in the irony and hope that the fresh spirit and determination of my peers will serve to dissolve a slightly jaded perspective toward health care while reinvigorating me on my journey into this maze of complexity and wonder that is medicine.