I
decided I wanted to be a surgeon five years ago. I was young, innocent, and quite naïve about all that the
career entailed. But I knew two
things for certain—one, blood, the bright red fluid that the little muscle in
your chest squeezes through your body, intrigued me and two, I wanted to help
people. Surgery seemed like a way
to do both. So I started taking
medical classes. I filled up my years with classes that focused on anatomy,
medical procedures, and how to save a human life. A short four years later
years later I landed an opportunity to be an intern at the hospital and thanks
to special connections and the knowledge I had picked up throughout the years,
I became more than an intern I became a project for Respiratory Therapists, Echo
cardiographers, Nurses, and even Surgeons to teach and mold into a potentially
amazing ________________ (I’m not quite sure where the path will take me
yet). But when people ask me about
the joys and the horrors I’ve seen, sometimes they are too gruesome or too
miraculous to share, but I will always remember.
I remember the call for a code; running down the stairs; and watching the cyanotic man flop onto the table, almost as if he was boneless. The adrenaline rush began, his life sustaining muscle had failed and whether he lived or died was in our hands. We pushed the Epinephrine and the Atropine and we sent jolts of electricity through his body in hopes that we would remind his heart that it was supposed to pump blood through 4 little rooms and then to the rest of his body. In between reminders, we were his heart. We compressed his chest and in return his chest squished the muscle enough to sent blood through his body. His heart didn’t work so we were his heart. He wasn’t breathing so we were his lungs. I took my turn filling in for his heart and when the time came to switch I stepped back. Minutes later a voice came over the radio, there was a certain horror that filled the room as the voice said, “come out of the hospital or I will shoot myself”. With that, those of us just waiting for a miracle ran to the locked doors. Sure enough there was a man, standing, with a gun to his head. A feeling of impending doom spread through the ER. No, we were not going to walk outside—he could easily shoot us. But he could just as easily walk into the room and kill us. So we called the police and we waited for the inevitable. We talked to him through the radio and told him not to, we tried to save his life but we weren’t going to sacrifice our own. In a flash he was gone. I stood with my face inches from the glass and watched as he pulled the little trigger that sent a bullet into his brains and out the other side. I watched the splatter of red body soup. I watched the man, who seconds ago was standing, fall to ground—crumpled and contorted in a way that human anatomy usually wouldn’t allow. I heard a nurse scream and a gasp that escaped from my own lips. And just like that, any innocence I had left dissipated into a memory.
Why did this happen? What would cause a person to feel the need to end their own life? Was it drugs? Was it a chemical imbalance? Was it an unknown, untreated illness? Who was he? In all honesty I wondered why I was okay—How could I just move on? Why was I smiling and laughing later that day? Am I heartless? If I can handle this, do I have a breaking point? I don’t have much to say about these thoughts, other than I had these thoughts and occasionally they are triggered. Sometimes they flash through my head as quickly as the bullet went through his head; and other times they tend to cling to the synapses in my brain, forcing me to think about the infinite amount of answers for any one of these questions. These questions come with the memory; they are etched into the grey matter of my brain alongside many other memories. You can’t choose what knowledge and memories carve their way into your brain. Our brains are an independent muscle; they are stubborn and are not easily persuaded. They are limitless but their stubborn minds create limits. So we fight against the limits. Our hearts and minds collide with one another’s thoughts and we go to war. Our body becomes a battlefield and soon we are a mess of frustrated, leaky eyes. War is a strange thing. It tears us apart only to leave us to rebuild, stronger than we’ve ever been. It throws out twists and changes that we learn to adapt to and before long we are a new person. We strive for greatness and when we fall short during our first try; we fight until we make it. Our brains set new limits that we fight to break again and again. Maybe that is how we move forward. Maybe the fight fuels our dreams forward. Maybe the fight is how we reach our potential.
Eventually I’ll go off to medical school, I’ll continue to break my limits, and I’ll engrave new pathways and fill them with knowledge and memories. I’ll conquer that independent muscle that lives in my skull, or at least I’ll keep fighting. What if we could conquer that stubborn muscle? What would we become? Would we grow stronger? Or would we stop growing all together? What would our limits be? What might we become if we evolved and could win the battle against our brains; if we took control and remained limitless; released ourselves from boundaries all together; if we emerged from the battle with no reason to fight again; if we cut our own path, carried our memories, and completely filled our brain matter. What would happen if we followed every thought or dream we had? What would change if we were completely in control, if we became what we fantasized about for all of our childhood years, what if we were in control and became creatures so brilliant and so fascinating and so utterly amazing that no one thought would ever evolve…
What then?
I remember the call for a code; running down the stairs; and watching the cyanotic man flop onto the table, almost as if he was boneless. The adrenaline rush began, his life sustaining muscle had failed and whether he lived or died was in our hands. We pushed the Epinephrine and the Atropine and we sent jolts of electricity through his body in hopes that we would remind his heart that it was supposed to pump blood through 4 little rooms and then to the rest of his body. In between reminders, we were his heart. We compressed his chest and in return his chest squished the muscle enough to sent blood through his body. His heart didn’t work so we were his heart. He wasn’t breathing so we were his lungs. I took my turn filling in for his heart and when the time came to switch I stepped back. Minutes later a voice came over the radio, there was a certain horror that filled the room as the voice said, “come out of the hospital or I will shoot myself”. With that, those of us just waiting for a miracle ran to the locked doors. Sure enough there was a man, standing, with a gun to his head. A feeling of impending doom spread through the ER. No, we were not going to walk outside—he could easily shoot us. But he could just as easily walk into the room and kill us. So we called the police and we waited for the inevitable. We talked to him through the radio and told him not to, we tried to save his life but we weren’t going to sacrifice our own. In a flash he was gone. I stood with my face inches from the glass and watched as he pulled the little trigger that sent a bullet into his brains and out the other side. I watched the splatter of red body soup. I watched the man, who seconds ago was standing, fall to ground—crumpled and contorted in a way that human anatomy usually wouldn’t allow. I heard a nurse scream and a gasp that escaped from my own lips. And just like that, any innocence I had left dissipated into a memory.
Why did this happen? What would cause a person to feel the need to end their own life? Was it drugs? Was it a chemical imbalance? Was it an unknown, untreated illness? Who was he? In all honesty I wondered why I was okay—How could I just move on? Why was I smiling and laughing later that day? Am I heartless? If I can handle this, do I have a breaking point? I don’t have much to say about these thoughts, other than I had these thoughts and occasionally they are triggered. Sometimes they flash through my head as quickly as the bullet went through his head; and other times they tend to cling to the synapses in my brain, forcing me to think about the infinite amount of answers for any one of these questions. These questions come with the memory; they are etched into the grey matter of my brain alongside many other memories. You can’t choose what knowledge and memories carve their way into your brain. Our brains are an independent muscle; they are stubborn and are not easily persuaded. They are limitless but their stubborn minds create limits. So we fight against the limits. Our hearts and minds collide with one another’s thoughts and we go to war. Our body becomes a battlefield and soon we are a mess of frustrated, leaky eyes. War is a strange thing. It tears us apart only to leave us to rebuild, stronger than we’ve ever been. It throws out twists and changes that we learn to adapt to and before long we are a new person. We strive for greatness and when we fall short during our first try; we fight until we make it. Our brains set new limits that we fight to break again and again. Maybe that is how we move forward. Maybe the fight fuels our dreams forward. Maybe the fight is how we reach our potential.
Eventually I’ll go off to medical school, I’ll continue to break my limits, and I’ll engrave new pathways and fill them with knowledge and memories. I’ll conquer that independent muscle that lives in my skull, or at least I’ll keep fighting. What if we could conquer that stubborn muscle? What would we become? Would we grow stronger? Or would we stop growing all together? What would our limits be? What might we become if we evolved and could win the battle against our brains; if we took control and remained limitless; released ourselves from boundaries all together; if we emerged from the battle with no reason to fight again; if we cut our own path, carried our memories, and completely filled our brain matter. What would happen if we followed every thought or dream we had? What would change if we were completely in control, if we became what we fantasized about for all of our childhood years, what if we were in control and became creatures so brilliant and so fascinating and so utterly amazing that no one thought would ever evolve…
What then?
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