A Doctor's Burden

Listening to the sound of slowing heart gave a gush of adrenaline mixed with fear, "Will the baby make it?". The grave situation baby was in, was to be communicated to it's mother, who was shouting in pain. The father was perplexed to see both his wife and child in distress. The team was in hurry, to get the baby out. Next 10 minutes was in fast forward mode. Everyone was running in all directions possible to make the theater ready and to receive and Resuscitate the baby. Though everyone was in panic, there was a ray of hope in all our hearts waiting to see the baby's first few moments...

The mother by then was resting on operation table, giving her entire self to the team, letting us open her womb. Finally, there was a huge relief, the first cry. None of us knew how the last few minutes passed by, but the end was good. Our panic settled down and we relaxed a bit to continue the surgery. Needless to say, the mother smiled once she heard her baby as well. How traumatic it would have been for her?

                           Picture Courtesy - Dr Ashok Chakravarti 

Does it always end happily? The honest answer will be a no. Medicine is filled with failures, failures of all sorts - right from losing a baby even before it's born, or a young teen who could not saved due to abdominal trauma or a boy battling for life because of a intra cranial hemorrhage or any death we all would have encountered in our profession. Every unfortunate incident brings in a sense of helplessness and anxiety which makes us question our skills, knowledge, competence and attitude. "Could anything else would have saved that patient? Did I do anything wrong?".

This is the most crucial, neglected part of medicine - "The Burden". I heard from one of my friends, "Why no one told us about the burden and the social responsibility we are bound to carry when we chose this profession?". Many of us realise slowly through time that we are not fit to practice this over whelming display of emotions all through life. We were prepared to handle the science and technicality, on the other hand we were and are in a constant everyday battle, of life and death situations with many crucial decisions in between. It takes a huge toll on our own inner self to handle and tackle our personal emotions.

It begins when we enter medical education itself. The cost of it is not the money or the amount of time we spend to study hard or the kind of path we had crossed before entering. The cost is when we truly enter with "The limelight". For an anxious 17 year old, who is made to believe the fact that, they are in the most celebrated, respectful and glorious possession, there is will be a sheer disappointment at various levels. The society in its entirety has tagged this profession with a brand value, which is truly exaggerated. It is not the only way to live or the best way to be rich. The idea of equating medicine to money making profession itself is so flawed to begin with, since the kind of situations we are bombarded into cannot be justified with any amount of money or nay material good for that sake. Every way of work has its own ups and downs. But others are not glorified and exaggerated like being a Doctor. Many a times, we have had conversations within ourselves about how being 17 year old is too early in life to take a life's decision which cannot be reverted. Here every medical student has to go through years of uncertainties with a social burden and has to finally come to the terms that they were betrayed. That this is just like any other profession.

A sense of being a celebrity and then pulled down drastically within half a decade is what every doctor usually goes through. Both are not needed and both are not true. Neither becoming a doctor is something huge nor being a specialist actually matters. 

When the limelight and the hierarchical field plays together, at every stage of training we are made to feel less about ourselves and we are forced to prove ourselves again and again, pushing us into a vicious cycle of education, degrees, peer pressure and glory. There is no space to pause and reflect on what we are forced to do. It is much more worse than a mere rat race. At the end of it, when we feel we are capable enough to start really to practice medicine, we slowly realise that our empathy, patience, goodwill, energy and our good productive years were all sucked out and had made us empty. At a point where we have to be emotionally mature to handle life and deaths, we end up detaching ourselves totally, turning us into a mere machine to work for a 8-5 schedule and go back home making sure that we don't carry anything from the hospital. Neither the patients nor the emotions. All because we were not made ready to face it. 

It is not only about the structure or the non empathetic system. Factors like relationships, gender and sexuality are not even discussed with an open mind within the peer group, making the vulnerable to be more vulnerable.

Medicine is neither an equitable field nor a mature way to handle ourselves. It is neither a privilege nor a curse.

The best and worst part of medicine is, it is learnt only after the formal education gets over. It begins truly after we stop stocking degrees. Maybe that's the essence of Medicine itself where we have raw, humane, never ending new battles every time we see a patient. Where patient becomes the book of knowledge teaching us every bit of our neglected part of training - To handle ourselves.

It is an extremely slow pace journey where we get mature, broken, shattered and grow from within all at the same time. If not for these adventurous learnings, this experience will never cease to be a burden. Forever.