Thirty Years Ago

It won't be long before these Saturday mornings by the fire are a pleasant memory. Not because of anything bad -- far from it: spring is finally making its way into Southern Maine and it's more than welcome. The lilacs outside the front door are budding (it's time to trim them back a little) and the steadily melting snow reveals the remnants of last fall's leaves that still need to be raked and bagged.

I'm eager to see what this place looks like once the perennials start to appear. My predecessor was a gardener in another life and the farm shows it. The apple trees should be a sight to behold and there were wild turkeys in the field yesterday for the first time since November.

I was recently asked by another writer what it was like being an older medical student. Although it didn't occur to me at the time, spring out here in the country is part of that. This week is spring break and my younger colleagues have scattered to the four winds. One anticipates a week on a Florida beach (she assured me she'll be studying and I believe her -- proof of my naivete?) and others are visiting significant others and family. I'm looking forward to getting out into the forest and cutting next year's firewood.

What I mean is, instead of medical school being an interlude or a stage I have to pass through to get somewhere else, it's more a part of life itself. I don't think I would have had the same perspective thirty years ago. I was too busy imagining how life would be once I was free of the constraints of academia. I still think that way to a certain extent, but I also think more about the daily experience as life itself.

I told her (the writer I mentioned) that having a background gives a person a context in which to situate their medical education. We talk about having had a life but I think being older helps us realize medical school (or any endeavor undertaken outside the traditional calender) is life. Two years immersed in anatomy, embryology, pharmacology, and a dozen or so other "ologies" can seem interminable, to be sure, but it constitutes life at the time. Somehow that perspective makes it all easier. Not any less difficult, not any less demanding, but it helps create an attitude of acceptance that produces an occasional peacefulness that reduces the stress.

I say that today -- someone remind me of it the week after next when we're facing another exam. :-)