Over the next two weeks in hospitals and medical centers across the country, new medical school graduates will begin their internship. Among their many worries — moving to a new city, meeting new colleagues, adjusting to medical training — is a more profound, existential concern that had once plagued me.
Do I have to lose my self in order to become the doctor I want to be?
I learned the answer to that question partway through my internship. Not in the hospital but in the checkout line of a local grocery store.
The customer in front of me was an older woman — she wore a faux camel-hair coat and had hair dyed a matching color. I remember that she had wanted her groceries bagged in a particular fashion, but the sales clerk, a young woman with impossibly long pink acrylics, was perplexed by the woman's demands.
I felt as if I had stepped into an avant-garde theatre production. Each time the young woman bagged the groceries, the older woman admonished her and asked her to go through the process yet again. The muscles of my jaw tightened with each round of bagging, and even though I was off for the day, all I could think was: I've got sick patients to take care of, I can't wait for this!
Unable to bear it any longer, I stepped forward and bagged the woman's groceries myself, shoving the plastic bags into her arms while resisting the urge to push her on her way. I imagined steam rising from my head as I ranted. But a part of me was as shocked as the people still standing in line. I had never lost my temper in a store, and I had never raised my voice in public. Now, a few months into internship and with a three-minute provocation, I had the capacity to act like a grizzly bear sprung loose from a trap.
I walked out of the store horrified. That night thinking back on the event, I grew more ashamed of my behavior. But I also realized that it was not the first time I had snapped. Over the previous months, I had thrown myself into my work and shunned everything I once enjoyed and nearly everyone I loved. I believed I needed to do so in order to become a surgeon.
But I had lost my self in the process, and the stress made me irritable. I was no longer the nonconfrontational person I once was.
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