I originally started this weblog as a way to give myself some perspective about medicine. To help me step outside the box, and try to look back in. But it’s getting tougher–and I don’t know how effective I am at it anymore. I feel like I’m already deep within the trenches of medicine; I exist solely to memorize drugs and bugs and get excited about situs inversus . I don’t feel like an outsider looking in anymore. If I was, I’m sure I’d be seeing more glaring examples of medical school changing me, but anymore, it just seems so normal.

And I’ve lost my compassion somewhere along the way, too. I know when I get to see patients, it’ll come back, but taking a sip from the firehose of information has pushed anything but the bare essentials to the side. I don’t like it. I don’t like that my compassion and my ability to put myself in a patient’s shoes isn’t a bare essential. I guess I always kind of assumed it was so intrinsic to myself as a person that it would never be pushed aside. Reality check. Ouch.

It’s mostly because the drug or the bug is removed from context. We memorize syndromes the bugs cause, or we memorize toxicities of drugs that we’ll administer, but it’s totally removed from a patient’s experience of the former or the latter. We don’t see a patient in pain or discomfort; we don’t see them feeling awful, or confused, or delerious because of a medicine. They’re just ideas or concepts. Words on a page. The things I can best remember are tied to friends–one friend who took Cipro or another who took a tetracycline–I can recall those the best. So maybe there’s hope yet.

I just have to hope that this temporary lapse in perspective and compassion will subside with time, and that I’ll go back to higher, more rational and caring brain functions once this is over. But on the other hand I wonder, if I can’t do it now, when *am* I going to do it?

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