Medic-Chat

Lucia Li -- “The time to stop talking is when the other person nods his head affirmatively but says nothing.”

Left to our own devices, we medics can be pretty lousy conversationalists. We are those awful people who no-one wants to invite en masse to parties because we congregate by ourselves in a little corner and talk about things sane people try to avoid.

My non-medic friends in college used to jokingly ban all “medic-chat” from parties, claiming that it demonstrated that we had no lives outside medicine (probably true) and that it was boring (evidently a falsehood). It’s a sad fact of life that we medical students talk about virtually nothing else but medicine (occasionally, we talk about medical school). And it’s actually very hard to not talk about medicine even when talking to non-medics. Ironically, that’s often when I talk about medicine the most, probably because I spend so much time in medicine that I have lost confidence in my ability to hold a decent conversation in anything else when wrenched from that bubble. (My non-medic friends would remark that medicine doesn’t make for a decent conversation either.)

But I am a staunch defender of “medic-chat”. Irrespective of whether medicine is a fascinating topic of conversation or not (it is), we medics would not survive as a profession without it. We certainly wouldn’t get through med school without it.

The practice of medicine is all about teamwork; talking about our jobs outside when we’re not working is just one part of that. Shared experiences forge stronger professional relationships and camaraderie. After a tough/ disappointing/ hard/ long day at the hospital, talking to a fellow medic about it is often just what’s needed to help you deal with it and, more importantly, make you want to go back in there and do it all again.

But by far the most important part about "medic-chat" is that it’s with other medics -- people who understand what it’s like, both the good bits and the bad. In the hospital, so much of what we are privileged to hear, see, and do is unique. Some of it is downright traumatic, revealing humanity at its worst, its most vulnerable. Acting as each other’s counselors, we don’t judge if another medic is less that PC about something, we understand the little triumphs, and we sympathize with the failures.

There will always be times when medicine is the last thing I want to talk about. But, when the going gets tough and I just have to deal with what’s coming, it’s the medic-chat that will see me through.