“You’re thinking about it all wrong,” my fiancé said. His voice poured from the phone like a warm cup of tea, steeped in the miles that stretched between us. “You still think you can be a savior, when really you’re a vessel. If you’re alone and giving someone CPR and they die, you can’t ask yourself if they would’ve lived by someone’s more experienced hands, because it was always going to be you. You were always going to be the one to find them.”
“But what if I could’ve known more, what if I could’ve done more?” I asked.
His voice had dimmed to a low buzz, as quiet as the operating room I had shadowed that morning, when the music had turned off, draining away the sound, leaving only the steady suctioning of blood. In its absence, my mind had circled around a lingering sediment of thought: am I watching a child die?
“You can’t ask yourself that,” my fiancé continued. “Because you were always going to find them as you are now – not in a decade, just as you are now. So when you find yourself alone, with no one else but you to take responsibility, you’ll do everything you can in that moment, and then you’ll continue. You’re going to have to continue.”
In a container by the bedside, a scarlet line had risen steadily– a marker of the patient’s hemorrhaged blood. A transfusion pricking the wrist had become our hourglass, each drip a second returned from what was taken. It was a fluke complication on a routine surgery.
“I don’t know if I can think that way, I don’t know if I can accept that,” I said. “I can’t accept the idea that I could fail.”
“You’re going to have to,” my fiancé said.
“What’s the biggest pro and con of your job?” I had asked the surgeon that question earlier that day, just as I asked everyone I shadowed.
“The trust people put in me, to allow me to do what I do, it’s a privilege,” the doctor had replied. “A real privilege. But the con? Trying to not become a shell of yourself.”
His comment was somewhat ironic as I had once loved the feeling of a seashell, during the moments spent studying at my desk in high school. Spine spiraling towards its center while I bent over my notes, skin translucent and shining with the glow from a computer screen, mouth pink and gaping around the tap of a pencil’s eraser nub. It was something about the delicacy of emptiness, smooth to the touch and hardened along its slopes. What once lived inside was gone, the last remnants rubbed away with a cloth and placed on a mantle to admire. A shell holds power in its insubstantiality, the way it curves around what once was and cradles the image of the ocean. Carved away to hear the rush of breath through hollows, a shell speaks only of distant places. It remains perfect. Wanted in its otherness. Beautiful.
Before medicine, I had come to reject my childhood obsession with perfectionism. In my undergraduate degree, I had explored new hobbies and had learned to cherish life’s smaller moments, like the quiet contentment of an afternoon walk. Yet medical school had awakened in me my childhood predilections at a heightened intensity. Perfectionism had become a lifeline, for I had entered a field where error was a close friend to fatality. The turn of my textbook’s pages fluttered in time with the heartbeats of future patients, so intimately linked that I dreaded their pause.
Was it arrogance that drove my ambition to become the one doctor who could not fail? Or was it a futile curling of the toes around the cliff’s edge before the plummet?
“You’re thinking about it all wrong,” my fiancé had said. “You still think you can be a savior, when really you’re a vessel.”
How I miss the summer days we spent together, skipping rocks along the river. My own attempts would inevitably sink with a spray of laughter, but my fiancé’s rode along the surface in jaunty enthusiasm. Each skip disrupted millions of water droplets in a rippling flourish of movement. I’ve often thought that if I was such a molecule, I would revel in my own autonomy, ricocheting spryly against my compatriots without ever noticing the pebble skipping far above the surface. How ridiculous it would seem, the idea of an external force beyond myself that was influencing the course of my life. And yet, how ridiculous it felt as I threw another pebble into the river, to think that these droplets were oblivious to the rock.
Plutarch, in his Life of Numa, makes mention of an idea with some salience in the Grecian world, from Plato on down: that inspiration was a gift from divine spirits; one that was given and just as easily taken away. For Numa, this was Egeria. Creativity flowed from an external source, it did not belong to the artist but was simply transferred to the world through their mortal forms. I wonder if there would be less physician burnout if we thought of healing in a similar light. We give much of our lives towards moulding ourselves into the most precise of instruments, the most knowledgeable of healers. And yet, we are ultimately vessels of whatever word would bring the greatest peace in its use– be it time, fate, chance, God.
I saw the patient from the operating room a week later in a follow-up clinic. The child was pale but smiling, cheerfully responding to all the surgeon’s questions as if completely unfazed by their previous encounter. What a difference a week could make, a week that had not been promised when I had watched at the edge of the operating room, a week that would now stretch into a lifetime. A few days ago I had silently begged the patient to breathe; now I was quietly grateful for the tranquil stream of conversation. With what wondrous brevity had our lives brushed against each other like particles swept along in some greater mystery, circling before rushing onwards in a marvelous cascade. “You’ll have to continue,” my fiancé had told me. And so we shall.
Contributing Writer
Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine
Kristen Anderson is a medical student at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario class of 2026. In 2022, she graduated from Stanford University with a B.S. in computer science. She enjoys reading and going on walks in the woods in her free time. After graduating medical school, Kristen would like to pursue a career in Psychiatry.