Well Readers...It's official. I have finished my first year of medical school. I passed all my classes, despite my endless agonizing and palpable anxiety about grades. It was by no means the best year I have ever had, nor anywhere close to my worst. However, readers, if you think this means my year was mediocre, you are sorely mistaken. This past school year has been...unlike anything school year I've ever experienced in my life. It's been filled with a lot of firsts, a lot of mistakes, a couple lasts. I've learned a great deal- not just things about medicine, but things about myself, and about humanity. I have no regrets, not even about the bad parts.
Of all the things I learned this year, I think the most important lesson is just how precious every single life is. We're all taught from an early age that "all men are created equal" and "respect others." However, I don't think I really grasped the truth and untruths of these statements until this past year. Perhaps this is a result of constantly learning about dysfunctions of the human body, but I've now come to really appreciate the frailty that is human life- how delicate the balance is that allows us to breathe, our hearts to beat in rhythm. We're constantly surrounded by danger- from microbes, from within ourselves, from the things we choose to surround ourselves with. Our ability to exist and live is a carefully timed orchestra of events that needs to happen exactly so. And yet, the way all the pieces come together is at best crude and simplistic. For example, one of the basic principles of how the human body works is diffusion. The movement of molecules from one container to another to even out their concentration between the two. However, molecules are not living organisms; they have no consciousness; there is no driving force, nor guiding hand that tells the oxygen molecules to move from our blood into our muscles. It's all random. I still have trouble wrapping my mind around it sometimes. The random movement of certain molecules, under the right conditions allows life, allows everything- from the very first single celled organism all the way up to human beings who have engineered rockets that have gone to the moon.
Perhaps the most depressing class of my first year of medical school was embryology. As much as it was a detailed account of how a life begins, it was also a stark reminder of how precise the orchestra that is life needs to be. In the first 3 to 8 weeks of gestation, the embryo relies on certain molecules called teratogens that tell the embryo's cells to grow into a heart or a leg, and help organise the cells so that one end of a limb nub turns into a thumb, while the other into a pinky. Too little, too much, or the wrong kind of teratogens leads to dire consequences. I still can't forget the picture our professor showed us of anencephaly- a condition in which the cranial vault (later the skull) fails to close. These unfortunate attempts at life look like something a depraved cartoonist might have dreamed up for an upcoming sci-fi/horror film.
All that being said, the second important lesson I learned is that humans, and life, are quite resilient- and this perhaps is a good reason to value it even more. Most people we see don't look like disfigured examples of science experiments gone wrong. The people on Earth are here because they won the lottery. They passed all the challenges and obstacles that mother nature set up for itself to prevent life from prevailing. Everyone around you- no matter how ungrateful or annoying they may seem- deserves to be here, and deserves to be alive.
I used to think myself an easy-going person, but I think I might have been lying to myself back then. I still had a lot of prejudices, and a lot of ideas about how a "normal" person should be. I was still quick to dismiss the person who never attended college; impatient with the person who could not calculate the product of 3 and 16 in under 2 seconds. I've learned this year, that there is no such thing as a "normal" person, and there is no gold standard that each of us needs to live up to (no matter how much society attempts to tell us so). Yes, we are all human: we exhibit similar patterns of behavior; we all conform to standards that society dictates to be virtuous and admirable. Yet each life, and each person remains unique. Each person's experience of this time on earth- their choices cannot be replicated. Even clones of much loved pet do not necessarily behave the same as their original. People should not be dismissed. I realize this is a nigh impossible goal. It is in our natures to want to compete with those around us- to wish to subjugate others (whether for our own glory or for others' own good). However, knowing what I know now- after this first year of medical school- I firmly believe that every person has a story. You can find something admirable about every man, woman, and child- and considering the obstacles every body must go through just to survive, and the extra mile it goes to thrive: everyone deserves respect and a chance to be heard.
