As I filled the syringe with cherry Kool-Aid and chased my terrified little brother around the house (time for your needle, Robin! Bwa-ha-ha-ha!), sometimes I’d concede that although being a baseball player or an astronaut would be amazing, being a doctor might be kind of okay, too.
*
The year I turned 11 my father accepted a job offer from the Ministry of Education in Jamaica. That summer our family packed up and moved from Chambly to a suburb just outside of Kingston. Once the initial culture shock subsided I began exploring my new environment. One good thing about the move was that it allowed me the opportunity to finally meet several family friends and relatives whom I had previously only spoken to on the telephone or seen in photographs. My godfather Maurison was one such person. He was my dad’s best friend from back in the Precambrian era when they were both bachelors. Their paths had separated when Maurison immigrated to Germany to study medicine. Upon completion of his studies he returned to Kingston to start a general practice. He could easily have opened his office in an affluent neighbourhood and grown wealthy over time, but that career trajectory held no appeal for him. Instead he set up shop in a desperately poor, underserviced and slightly dangerous part of the city. He worked long hours, coordinated public health outreach programs and allowed his patients to pay whatever they could afford. He didn’t get rich, but he loved his work and the community adored him.
Maurison looked after my various allergy-related afflictions, so over the next few years I ended up spending a lot of time in his office. Since I was his godson, no part of the building was considered out of bounds to me. I’d leaf through his illustrated medical textbooks, count the bones in the artificial skeleton hanging in the storage room, marvel at the distorted cortical homunculus figurine and puzzle over arcane pieces of medical equipment in the various cupboards and drawers. The one I liked best was a device similar to an egg timer that he often carried in one of his lab coat pockets. As far as I could tell, its only function was to ring loudly 30 minutes after it was switched on. One day I asked him what it was for.
“Oh that,” he grinned. “If I’m running late and I’m about to see a patient who tends to ramble, I turn it on before I go in. When it starts ringing I exit under the pretense of having to take an urgent call from the hospital. It’s not exactly kosher, but sometimes that’s the only way I can escape from an examination room!”
“Wow,” I thought, as I left his office that day, “Life-saving work. Cool gear. A dash of subterfuge. Aside from the lousy hours, medicine’s not such a bad gig after all… .”
*
When I was 19 my family moved from Jamaica back to Canada. We arrived in Winnipeg a few weeks before I was scheduled to enter university. My grades were excellent, but I had no clue as to what I wanted to study. Education? English literature? Law? In the midst of my tortuous deliberations I got a letter from Paul, a good friend from my high school in Jamaica. He informed me that my old flame was dating a medical student. What?! That did it. In the blink of an eye my decision was made – I’d take the prerequisite two years of health sciences courses and then apply to the Faculty of Medicine.
The following essays and anecdotes chronicle some of the experiences I’ve had over the course of my medical career. It’s been a fantastic adventure, and it is still unfolding.
*
P.S. Several years after I graduated from med school I discovered my friend got the story all wrong – the fellow my ex had dated had been studying aviation, not medicine. I’m glad Paul didn’t get his facts straight, otherwise right now I’d probably be somewhere up in the stratosphere piloting a 747. And I really hate flying.
PART ONE
Learning the Ropes: Med School
and the First Urban ER Year
Welcome to the Machine
There is nothing more exciting than opening your mailbox and finding a big, fat envelope from the medical school you applied to. Skinny envelope – not so good. Those contain cachectic little one-pagers that may as well begin, “Dear John… .” A bulging envelope, on the other hand, means you’re in like Flynn. I got mine back in the spring of 1983. At the time my parents were both teaching up in northern Manitoba and my brother had already left for school, so I had to do the Snoopy Dance by myself. Didn’t matter. I was still the happiest guy in the world.
Nowadays when I reflect on how cavalierly I approached the entire med school application process I shake my head in disbelief. Not only did I not bother to take any MCAT prep courses, I only left myself enough time to write it once before the application deadline. I elected to apply to a single medical school rather than to the customary five or six. Lastly, I refused to wear a suit to the all-important interview (those were my fractious motorcycling days, and at the time I felt suits were definitely not cool). Despite my best passive-aggressive attempts to sabotage myself, I got in. Then the real fun began.
My first inkling I wasn’t in Kansas anymore came on the first day of term when each of our seven lecturers assigned us roughly 25 pages of reading homework. 175 pages wouldn’t have been that difficult had we been granted a few days to slog through the material, but they all seemed to expect we’d have everything memorized by the next morning. On day two another 100-plus pages were piled on. And so on. By the end of the first week we were drowning in paperwork. But med school was just getting warmed up… .
During the second week we began working in the cadaver dissection lab, or Gross Lab as it was affectionately referred to by our preceptors. I had never even seen a human corpse before, never mind taken a scalpel to one. I was so wigged out by the concept that the night before our first trip to the lab I had a nightmare about working down there alone and turning around to find a cadaver sitting up and staring at me. It was like something straight out of The X-Files. I woke up in a pool of cold sweat.
The next morning 99 nervous newbie first-year medical students filed silently into the lab. As we answered the alphabetical roll call we were assigned six to a body; three down the cadaver’s left side and three down the right. Once we were all in our proper places we were given the order to unzip our respective body bags. When I peeled open our bag, the distasteful tang of formaldehyde leapt into the air. Although no one keeled over and face-planted like those poor saps in the opening credits of Quincy, I have to admit we did all take an involuntary half-step backwards before pausing to inspect our cadaver. Approximately 60, male, tall, thin, left forearm anchor tattoo. Dead. A few seconds passed and no one in our group moved forward. After another several seconds I realized what was going on – no one wanted to be the first to touch the body. We eyed each other nervously. Then the fellow next to me leaned over and raised the cadaver’s wrist. He furrowed his brows and pantomimed checking for a radial pulse.