Nothing will ever be the same once it's different!!!
Nothing will ever be the same once it's different!!!
“I don’t communicate my feelings. My entire family was like that. We’ve always sort of just swept things under the rug. I think that’s what makes me a good ER nurse. I don’t take things home with me. I can separate myself emotionally and just focus on what needs to be done. But it also makes me pretty bad at relationships. I met Gavin while traveling in Europe last year. We traveled together for two weeks, then he came home and met my family, and then we went to Mexico for a week. After that we talked every day. Gavin was the opposite of me. He was warm and happy and touchy. He’d even tell random strangers that they looked nice. But I pulled back the moment we got too close. Because I don’t like the feeling of being dependent on someone. Gavin was killed in a car crash at the end of January. He was alone in England and I didn’t even find out until days after it happened. I’ve tried to handle it like I always do. I try not to think about it or talk about it. But it’s not working so well this time. I’m taking things more personally at work. If a patient comes in the ER with similar injuries, I always ask myself: ‘What if this was Gavin?’”
“I was taking a law school admissions test in a big classroom at Harvard. My friend and I were some of the only women in the room. I was feeling nervous. I was a senior in college. I wasn’t sure how well I’d do. And while we’re waiting for the exam to start, a group of men began to yell things like: ‘You don’t need to be here.’ And ‘There’s plenty else you can do.’ It turned into a real ‘pile on.’ One of them even said: ‘If you take my spot, I’ll get drafted, and I’ll go to Vietnam, and I’ll die.’ And they weren’t kidding around. It was intense. It got very personal. But I couldn’t respond. I couldn’t afford to get distracted because I didn’t want to mess up the test. So I just kept looking down, hoping that the proctor would walk in the room. I know that I can be perceived as aloof or cold or unemotional. But I had to learn as a young woman to control my emotions. And that’s a hard path to walk. Because you need to protect yourself, you need to keep steady, but at the same time you don’t want to seem ‘walled off.’ And sometimes I think I come across more in the ‘walled off’ arena. And if I create that perception, then I take responsibility. I don’t view myself as cold or unemotional. And neither do my friends. And neither does my family. But if that sometimes is the perception I create, then I can’t blame people for thinking that.”
#controlyouremotion#controlyourlife
“I’m not Barack Obama. I’m not Bill Clinton. Both of them carry themselves with a naturalness that is very appealing to audiences. But I’m married to one and I’ve worked for the other, so I know how hard they work at being natural. It’s not something they just dial in. They work and they practice what they’re going to say. It’s not that they’re trying to be somebody else. But it’s hard work to present yourself in the best possible way. You have to communicate in a way that people say: ‘OK, I get her.’ And that can be more difficult for a woman. Because who are your models? If you want to run for the Senate, or run for the Presidency, most of your role models are going to be men. And what works for them won’t work for you. Women are seen through a different lens. It’s not bad. It’s just a fact. It’s really quite funny. I’ll go to these events and there will be men speaking before me, and they’ll be pounding the message, and screaming about how we need to win the election. And people will love it. And I want to do the same thing. Because I care about this stuff. But I’ve learned that I can’t be quite so passionate in my presentation. I love to wave my arms, but apparently that’s a little bit scary to people. And I can’t yell too much. It comes across as ‘too loud’ or ‘too shrill’ or ‘too this’ or ‘too that.’ Which is funny, because I’m always convinced that the people in the front row are loving it.”
“There’s a strange culture in medicine. People are less friendly to each other than I imagined. I got an MD and a PhD in Neuroscience. I’m finishing my residency right now. I guess I thought that everyone would be compassionate, and would help each other, and would be nice to each other. And don’t get me wrong—I work with a lot of compassionate people. But the stress just erodes people. There’s a lot of tension and anger. We’re taught that 80 hours per week is normal and shouldn’t be questioned. But at the same time, a huge amount of work that medical interns do is administrative. It could be outsourced without affecting the quality of education or care. And the culture does real harm. I’ve had two friends commit suicide. One of them was studying anesthesiology at Yale and overdosed in a parking lot. The other jumped off the dorm building at NYU. There’s got to be a better way. I don’t know, maybe I’m just saying this because I’m stressed. I’m heading to the ER now. I’m almost at the end of my residency. I can see the end of the tunnel. But the tunnel is very damaging.”
I think the mind set of being a medical students is beyond any measures. The expectations and judgment of your close circle of people matters so much. Hang in there, you’re almost done. Success stories like you give a hope to someone like me that’s inspired & hope to be in medical field.
