Emily R.'s previous work for The Toast can be found here.
At the start of medical school we all had great aspirations. Vague notions of oncology research, of cracking open chests in the emergency department, saving the day, transplanting hearts. But gradually over four years it became clearer that those things were harder, and less glamorous, than they seemed in the abstract. A month in oncology was emotionally like being hit repeatedly over the head. The emergency department was mostly full of people who had sustained minor injuries in improbable ways. Any kind of transplant seems to take as long as an entire season of Grey’s Anatomy, with more blood but admittedly less romantic intrigue.
So because all one hundred and eighty of us cannot be sports-medicine specialists in aviation and deep-sea diving, we see a little bit of everything over the years, to form a (realistic) idea of what field you might like to eventually specialize in. Some things I found mildly interesting: anaesthetics, head and neck surgery, dermatology, infectious diseases. Some things were downright repulsive (ophthalmology.) Others were bewildering (haematology, pathology, renal medicine), and others were just faintly unpleasant (paediatrics, where the patients vomit cheerfully everywhere with no regard for societal standards or infection control.)
With a growing sense of unease I started to realize: nothing is sticking. Everything was more or less fine and vaguely engaging but nothing caught my imagination and made me want to know more, to get up early in the morning. Maybe I wasn’t meant to be here at all.
Christmas 2013 rolled around. I had finished my time in urology, where I had more dealings with prostates than I would ever care to repeat. It was cold, dark, windy, rainy; black at seven a.m. when I left the house and again at 5 when I got home. I find myself in the maternity hospital. It was full of women shouting, every kind of bodily fluid conceivable (see what I did there), sore feet, stretch marks, catheters, raging hormones, indescribable destruction of pelvic floors. And I loved it. What a privilege, to be literally the first to see a new life come into the world, to stand with new parents as they go somewhere they’ve never been, to hold a woman’s hand as she realizes that she can do it after all, to be even the smallest part of the best day of someone’s life. Obstetrics! Finally, I think, maybe I’ve found it.
Read more An Irishwoman Abroad: Learning Obstetrics in Paris at The Toast.