On Life Epiphanies

Ben Ferguson -- My brother was walking down the street the other day and saw one of his high school classmates get hit by a car. The kid was wearing headphones while riding his bike and blew a stop sign. The offending car hit him pretty hard apparently. When my brother got to him, he was bleeding heavily from his head and appeared to be having intermittent seizures. My brother, his girlfriend, and the driver stayed with him until the ambulance arrived, holding his hand and reassuring him that medical attention would arrive shortly.

As a high school kid who’s never seen anything that even resembles this, save for violence on television, how could you possibly deal with this? I’m not talking medically here; I’m talking mentally. Most people I know, let alone a naive teenage kid without a care in the world, haven’t seen anything as heavy as this. Afterward, he called my mom, an anesthesiologist, to tell her what he’d seen, and she was able to give him a few do’s and don’ts in case anything like that ever happened again: make sure not to move him lest he had suffered a spinal injury, etc.

Later that day, undoubtedly after some reflection, he admitted to my mom that he so wished he’d been able to help more, that he felt so helpless just sitting there holding the kid’s hand while he waited for the actual doers to come do something useful. Maybe, in fact, he’d like to be one of those people, those first responders who are so crucial to saving lives in the field.

And it got me thinking: Isn’t that how so many of us get into this business? I hear so often of folks going to medical school because they suffered through a grandparent’s or a parent’s illness and had so much meaningful interaction with the relative’s care team that they wanted to be on that side of things. Maybe they themselves had struggled with an illness earlier in life. Maybe they’d experienced some other life-altering (life-threatening?) epiphany that made them realize that they want to be in medicine to be able to help those who go through similar struggles. As an interviewer, I hear this literally all the time, and no one would argue that it’s a perfectly legitimate reason for at least putting medicine on the map of potential career choices, if not acting as the paramount reason for ultimately choosing this field.

I personally didn’t have one of these experiences that so influenced me. Nothing about my decision to attend medical school was epiphanic. Mine was a more gradual realization based on a number of factors. In fact, both of my parents are physicians, and they largely did everything in their power to discourage me from entering medicine. While I had experienced their lives as physicians first-hand and therefore had a good idea of what medicine was like, my decision was one I came upon myself after much introspection. At the risk of invoking a certain sense of schadenfreude, perhaps my decision would have been expedited with such a dramatic medical experience!

What experiences motivated you all to get into medicine? Any other epiphanies out there? As someone who didn’t really have one to speak of, I’d love to hear about them.