I don’t even know how to tell this story but I’m just going
to go ahead and try.
We always talk about self love and how not to seek your
validation and self worth from other people or things, and all of that other
stuff, but I doubt most human beings really get it. Take this from someone
who’s been struggling for a while now (and still struggling cos’ in all
honesty, I don’t think I’m there yet) to fully grasp the concept of what it
really means to show yourself the same love and grace you so judiciously give
to everyone else.
It was intern year, and like most other interns, it was a
period of soul searching for me- soul searching in terms of what medical
subspecialty I’d like to settle into after intern year. This is usually a
tricky period for most interns cos’ there’s always a tendency to get confused
as to where you really fit into as you move through the different rotations. That
is for normal people. Your girl here almost, if not for God in heaven, made her
choice based on her like and dislike for two different individuals she met
during the course of her rotations. In retrospect, it seems a bit funny right
now, but aarggh, oluwa! What was I thinking?.
Towards the end of med school, I was still in a dilemma,
trying to decide between the two subspecialties I felt I was interested in, but
my indecisiveness at the time was not a problem because I truly believed that
by the end of my intern year, having done rotations in both fields, it’d become
clear which was a better fit for me.
I will not mention what fields these were just yet till I
get to the end of the story, but we’ll refer to them as “field A” and “field B”
for now.
So med school was over and within
the following couple of months, intern year started and boy, was it exciting!
At the end of my rotations in
field A, I had convinced myself and all the powers that be of my village-people
that field A was definitely where I was going to specialize in. But here’s the
catch; During my rotations in field A, I developed this really huge, naa, huge
doesn’t define it, we’ll go with the word, “cosmic”.
So I developed this cosmic crush on a senior
colleague of mine, whom in my defense by the way, was doing everything right by
the book, and I mean EEEEEVERYTHING, my mumu button was legit getting ready to
port to its true owner. And you see baa, that’s the thing with village people,
they’re the most supportive bunch of evil people you’ll ever find, cos’ baby
girl already saw a future with “supposed future husbae”. I’m talking “Prof and Prof. Mrs” kind of future.
All that was left was for our crush to say the next right words, and I’m not even
talking “the main-the main” right
words yet oo, I just needed something along the lines of “I see a possible future with you in it”, and I might as well have
gone off to lock down the backyard of my father’s house in the village before all
em’ August-meeting people book it.
Thankfully, village-people powers have an expiration date
and I really don’t know how to explain it but I sha had to sit with myself and
ask myself if I was really about to make a career choice just based on whatever
I thought I had going with this other person and wanting to make them the
centre of my own life, or if I actually, really wanted to choose this path out
of sheer passion and love for the craft?
The answer to that? Your guess is as good as mine.
Then came rotations in “field B”, which had always been my
no.1 option by the way, in that it was an area which had called out to the very
depths of my soul even before med school years, and not surprisingly, was the
only rotation during intern year where I actually enjoyed the learning
process (well up to a point anyway), despite how daunting it was. So I went
into that rotation with an open mind, and so full of life, and all was good and
fair in the land till the day I met “her”.
Now, I know there’s
this belief that doctors trained in this our shitty system tend to be vile and
mean and for some twisted reason, derive joy in making the practice unbearable
for the younger generation, and of course the younger ones being exposed to all
that bad energy eventually imbibe that and begin to display similar behavior patterns
towards the next generation simply because “we all went through it, so you (younger
generation) will go through it too”, and the vicious cycle continues. I
get that. I mean, I’d been at the receiving end of that twisted cycle a lot of
times and so, I try really hard to not hold it against them. Of course there were
always those really nice senior colleagues who were, are, and continue to
remain the exception to that rule, but nothing, and I repeat nothing could have
explained “her” own behaviour.
I can’t and won’t go into details, but let me just say, that
it’s bad enough when the people working under you dislike you with every bone
in their body, but when even your peers detest the idea of being in the same
room with you, when your own peers can take a look at the duty roster for the
day, see your name alongside theirs and automatically resign their fate to
having a bad day, so much that it shows in their countenance, when patients
request to speak with the doctor-on-call for the day, hear your name mentioned
and decide that they’d much rather take their chances and wait till the next
day when they can see another doctor, then we definitely, definitely do have a
serious problem.
And that was how my happy days during the course of that
rotation came to an end, having to be among the few unlucky, yes I say unlucky
cos’ that’s what we were- the unlucky interns that were assigned to work under
her. To say I was scarred would be a gross understatement. I spent most days at
work just staring at her, as if trying to get a glimpse of her soul, hoping
that maybe if I did, it’d help me better understand how one human being could
be so, so, so remotely inhuman.
By the end of that rotation, I made up my mind that it
wasn’t the right fit for me after all, because I couldn’t imagine having to
work in that field, under such kind of person or persons as the case may be,
because for all I knew, she might have had prodigies baking in the oven, getting
ready to be dispatched to every hospital in every corner of the world.
And once again, I’d made a major life decision based on how
another human being treated me.
Well of course I got over it, snapped out of that pity
party, and found myself, thank heavens for wisdom.
I know y’all are waiting
for the moral lesson here, but there isn’t. I’m just here to say, “if you like, be silly”, end of story!
I also know that y’all are curious as to which subspecialty
I finally decided on, and if it was any of the above mentioned—story for
another day I guess.
Till next time...
xoxo!!!
Alma Rosenfield