Writing Again

I cannot gauge whether anyone ever read the bimonthly columns I used to write for the Pakistan Post, or whether people just used them for wrapping fragile items that would then be stored in the remote reaches of cabinets (as my parents used to do with the paper before I started writing for it!), so I don’t know if anyone noticed my prolonged silence. Suffice it to say that I felt the burdens of being a second year in medical school, working for a student-run human rights organization, and being an adviser at my undergraduate alma mater were so overwhelming that I felt that I could not squeeze writing into my busy schedule. Now, months later, I am sitting at my desk, unable to read the chapter about trauma and surgical approaches to it because of my unbearable sensation of ennui. I fidgeted in my chair, played with Genghis Khan, my cat, and ate chocolate from Godiva’s before I realized what the problem was: for so many months, I had been reading other people’s writing, without having contributed anything remotely interesting or intellectual in the form of the written word.

Back in October, when I wrote my last column, I felt as though I didn’t have any interesting things to write about anymore, primarily because I was kept so busy that I had no time to think. The demands of medical school were making themselves fully felt, and the pressure to learn everything about medicine faster than humanly possible was building up. For so much of this past year, I felt like an inadequate student because of the sheer amount of information I needed to learn. I struggled both to maintain my sanity and my sense of balance in life, and also to learn the basic scientific material that would become my foundation as a physician. The resolve to maintain my sanity became stronger as I saw my classmates spending 24 hours a day in our medical education building (people actually began to sleep on the couches in the atrium instead of going home so that they could maximize on study time), or ignoring friends’ phone calls in order to cram. It was a whirlwind of a year, but luckily I survived without ever having to resort to sleeping on the couches in public…(except for that one time during Ramadan when I curled up on the couch, so hungry and sleep-deprived that I no longer cared if my professor saw my drooling onto the neuroscience textbook I was using as a pillow). That unfortunate episode aside, I felt a sense of relief as second year concluded without any mental breakdowns .

My initiation into my clerkship years as a third year medical student began this past May. Since then, it has been quite busy, especially because my first rotation is surgery, and so I spend an average of 15 hours a day in the hospital. Over this past month, I’ve seen and experienced things that I could never have imagined, and I’ve done things that probably only Jack the Ripper had done (such as the time when I had to hold a patient’s intestines against one side of his body while the surgeon operated on the opposite side, or when I removed someone’s rib with an instrument that resembled a large nutcracker, or when I used the sharpest surgical scalpel to cut through an infected toe). My intimate connections with the human body have left me puzzled as to how to respond, and I realize that part of this confusion lies in the fact that I have no outlet for my thoughts. The way I deal with all experiences in my life is to talk things through, or write things down, and I realized that I missed expressing the creative aspect of my nature.

So here I am—with a renewed enthusiasm for creativity and the magic of words, a sense of inspiration, and the desire to share those experiences that have left me alienated from the majority of mankind (unless of course you happen to be either a serial killer or a physician). What you desire to do with the written word is up to you, reader. I promise I won’t be offended if you continue to use this column to wrap your fine china for winter storage—I swear my mother still continues to use the paper for that purpose, despite the fact that this may be the only place where her daughter’s name appears in print. Recycle and reuse, she would defend herself if I were ever to confront her, so I grant you the same license.