Second semester- I wanted to write a little more (blog-style) because it feels so good. It is that therapeutic release of my right-brained self. I am caught up in a left-brained world right now. It is very interesting- spending all of my days amidst people and institutions that are so science-oriented. Life becomes very practical, and a subculture is bred where the citizens attempt to corral everything into precision; their schedules, their futures, their questions, their answers. It is a subculture where people don't like to not have answers. I find myself staring at the gap, between what is happening and what should be the right answer, to be growing exponentially bigger. The more I learn, the more the gap widens into a great great canyon.
Last week I started to despair (a little) over this. Nursing is much more in-depth than I expected. I want to be a great nurse. I want to understand diseases and medications and interpersonal relations and laboratory results and...
I want to be a good nurse.
To keep me sane, to keep me from worrying about this and to progress me in the direction of my goals I decided it was time to buy a box of crayons and a big white sketch pad.
You will most likely not find me in front of my computer anymore studying. I will be in my backyard, laying on the grass, sketching out the clinical manifestations of liver cirrhosis (using "brown licorice" of course), or putting happy faces on the mob of friendly immune-boosting white blood cells decorating my page.
My dear friend Sophie, the doctor I met in Ghana while volunteering at the health clinic, has served as a true source of inspiration for me throughout the last 2 years of my schooling process. She hasn't said anything, or counseled me, or given me direct advice. But who she is, her energy, her drive and her perseverance have continually encouraged me in what I am doing. She made it very clear to me that most of what we get in life is because of the sacrifice and the hard work we have put in along the way.
I remember one day on a village outreach where she put her stethoscope around my neck and placed the diaphragm up against the frailest chest I had ever seen. I heard a swooshing sound. She moved the stethoscope around to different parts around the child's heart and all sounded like water flowing down a river. "He's got what you might refer to as "a hole in his heart"." The patient was tiny and wasting away. His mother sat there with a very plain, resigned look on her face. Extreme poverty, most times, squelches even hope for one's own child. But Sophie referred him to a hospital in the big city, tapped into the emergency patient funding at the clinic, and 1 open-heart surgery and a year later we visited a very vibrant, healthy, fortunate little boy.
Later we talked about her career, the satisfying aspects and the more mundane parts, the challenging times. She told me more about having dyslexia and trying to write competent doctors notes. "And school wasn't easy. but i met a really good friend, and we'd study together the way we learned best. I had to do it the way that worked best for me even if I looked silly. We would draw everything out. That's pretty much how I got through med school!"
I noticed tonight when I opened my sketch pad to study my drawings; the colors and shapes and the weird quotations popping out of body parts that i was enlivened to draw more and study more. I also saw the canyon of unknowing shrink just a tiny bit.
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