Why I Don’t Give up on Medicine . . . and You Shouldn’t Either.
A friend sent this picture to me yesterday. It’s from a time when I lived in an intentional community on a trajectory to becoming a cult. The headscarf tells me I was at least 15 years old, after the time all community members adopted the shaved head as a sign of solidarity and of equal ownership of and responsibility for the community--women challenged to walk the walk and not just talk the feminist talk, which really meant making a bigger, stronger, more personal demonstration than the men did. It means it is after my mother ran away from home. That I’m sitting in an office tells me I had already taught myself to type at night so that I could do work besides cleaning, food service, or landscaping, and it also meant I was already married though not yet 18. I was a child whose dream was to become a doctor one day. On the road ahead of me was leaving a cult, taking the GED, petitioning successfully for acceptance at UC Berkeley, graduating from medical school at UCSF, becoming a surgeon and so much more. And this is why I believe that so much is possible for us in our beautiful profession despite the problems we face and how insurmountable they can seem. Besides our beautiful opportunity as physicians to have a front row seat at the table of life, we have our own beautiful, visionary selves and the power of caring.
Just over 6 years ago, I left my academic surgery post to begin what I thought would be just a year sabbatical to try to address ways to make a healthier culture of practice in surgery. How I decided to do that and what has happened along the way are stories I have been afraid to tell, but what I have learned is that our fear of losing our identity and livelihood binds us in ways that sap our vitality, compromise our calling, and leave us feeling much more helpless than we are. My next entry will set the stage for this transition, what transpired and how my way of handling that had long term consequences I did not anticipate. I hope you will join me on this journey.
Lauren
