Pre Med Musings on Coursenroll and House

Last night, after a successful day of nothing-but-bio, I rewarded myself with back-to-back House episodes. I sat with my llama piñata on my lap and ate cookies-n-cream Hersey's kisses out of its belly for almost a full hour. This seemed to me to be the life: candy, doctor show, and imagining my blossoming career as a medical professional (especially after my aforementioned success in biology-I am practically a doctor already).

At the end of the second episode, however, House lost a patient. This has happened before. We've dealt with it. It happens! I know. Maybe it was the slow motion, or the Coldplay-ish song, or the wife's face and silent scream as her husband passed away, but I got really upset.

I watched as Chase tried to keep reviving the patient in vain. The team of doctors had solved the case and made the correct diagnosis, but not in time.

I sat and thought about my classes for next semester, which I chose this morning. Chem, physics, human biology and evolution, human sexuality, and statistics, or some combination. I am on a track to medical school, hopefully at least, and I am usually really enthused about this prospect. I think about all the people I will help and how proud I will be of myself and how many incredible discoveries I might make should I ever do research.

But on the eve of choosing my classes for next semester, I thought for a while about the darker side of medicine. When you don't solve the case or save the patient or make a difference or discover something incredible. Of course, when moving forward, this is not the kind of thing to think about on a regular basis. The same way people in Israel don't go around being afraid of bombs and people still fly in planes even though they could crash. You can't, otherwise you'd never leave the house, or declare a major.

So I am generally pretty positive. In fact, I'd say I'm ecstatic about my future possibilities. I do honestly believe that I am going to save lives and help people. But last night made me realize--for some reason, in a way that I had not totally absorbed before on this level--that I will lose patients. I will not solve every case, and there will be families who blame me for the loss of their loved one. There will be families that are broken because I will not be able to save or treat my patient. I might have to give people terminal diagnoses, or tell someone there are no more options left. I will have to witness death, something that I have yet to experience.

This may seem egotistic. Indeed, it is. I am worried about how I will feel when I fail to treat my patient, and how that patient's family will feel about me. I cannot pretend that while my profession is about treating patients, how I feel about my job will probably be more related to how I feel about my own success and reward as a doctor and not my patients (although these are inextricably linked). I realize that I will be working with a team, most likely, and that there will be uncontrollable factors, but I know that I will still feel enormous responsibility (the same way I would want to feel enormous responsibility for something positive).

I also recognize that I have not yet chosen my specialty, and I might choose a nice calm field where I deal mainly with adolescent acne or overeager parents who spend too much time on the internet and invent diseases for their children. But I probably won't choose such a specialty, because while the risks are lower, so are the gains and opportunities to really change lives. I'm also assuming that I will be part of a variety of procedures and dabble in many areas during medical school and training (in fact, it is my understanding that it is somewhat the entire point to dabble in many areas).

These are my thoughts of the day. Obviously, I am writing these in a public forum and welcome opinions, especially those of people with more life experience

(or at least people who more regularly watch doctor shows).