I never thought I could be a doctor. I used to faint at the sight of anything medical.
I was 13 years old. Our class was attending a birds and the bees talk. I sat with 50 other kids on the steps of a mini-amphitheater. The teacher pointed to the large plastic uterus. Tunnel-vision, weak all over... My teenage survival instincts told me to pretend to sleep on the steps. The other pre-syncopal teens with heads bowed evidently had a similar inner voice.
As an orderly in a local hospital I watched a well-intentioned nurse insert a urinary catheter. The world became a tunnel, I soaked with sweat and the chair on wheels ran away as I grappled to sit. Suddenly I was the focus of attention. Where was I?
We dissected a placenta in medical school. I hobbled in my black-out fog to the more private bathroom.
As a resident emergency physician I was peeling fruit and accidentally created a 3 mm cut in the web space of my left hand. I gently explored my dinky incision. I awoke on the kitchen floor. Then I ate the apple.
I no longer pass out at the site of anatomy, pathology and procedure. Some switch turned on (or off). Medicine moved from the emotional "passing out" section of my brain…to the logical, analytic "red blood cells have no nuclei and mitochondria is inherited from the mother" part of my brain. I forget that these things used to be gross. I have extended periods of consciousness.
Comments