Why Medicine?

It cannot be possible that I am old enough to have finished my first clinical rotation of medical school. It feels like just yesterday I was working through Organic Chemistry II thinking, “Eventually, this will all pay off.” But in a blink, it’s true. I’ve been called “Doc” on accident by patients, I’ve taken care of people on the brink of death, and I’ve had to help break the news to a patient that they have a new chronic disease that will affect their life forever. In the back of my mind, in each of these situations, I’ve thought, “Certainly, this is not how it was meant to be.”

As many of you know, my faith in Christ is what guided my path to get to this spot. There’s no way I could have faced the Basic Science years without His grace in allowing me to plug on through the hours of studying and the stressful exam weeks. Many of you probably felt that I disappeared for that year and a half, and I probably did. I questioned during that year whether medical school was for me. Transitioning from a sorority house in Stillwater to Houston where I knew NO ONE, was…complicated. But by the grace of God, I’ve experienced the depth of loneliness and been blessed by some wonderful new friendships. Finally, I’ve made it through the basic science years to rotations and started to feel “useful” (I use the term lightly).

I thought I would learn a whole lot about medicine in the last three months. I thought right. I’ve learned so much medicine in the last three months: how to handle congestive heart failure, how to do an arterial blood gas, how to diagnose and treat electrolyte abrnormalities, the altered mental status workup, the guidelines for HIV prophylaxis, and sickle cell crisis management to name a few. However, I am fairly surprised to say how much I have learned about the state of our feebleness, how utterly broken the human condition is.

In Scripture, the story of creation tells us that God looked at all He created and said, “It is good” and when He looked at humans He said, “It is very good.” Sometimes I think He said it like this, “Dang, look how good they look!” Theologians often describe this use of the word “good’ as “complete”, “perfect”, or “as it should be”. And yet, a little while later we hear the story of man’s first sin which broke this “goodness” and brought death into the world. In short, because our sin the world was no longer “as it should have been” when God created it. We could stop here, but the story continues. It is God’s great redemptive story, that can be read elsewhere. He is using this world to continue to change things back to “how they should have been”.

Everyday, I see the results of this brokenness in the hospital. People really are hurting. The “great equalizer” is constantly around the corner. Even patients who have relatively benign conditions which will resolve with some IV antibiotics ask is “Doc, am I going to die from this?” And yet even in this brokenness, there is great happiness. Even in this brokenness, there are moments of great honesty, and there are moments of healing!

To be honest, this is medicine to me. No, I don’t believe medicine in itself is holy as many physicians portray it to be (including Christian physicians). In my mind, only God is holy. However, I do believe by God’s common grace to ALL people, He has created this gift of medicine for us to use to help people who are broken by the results of original sin: sickness, disease, death. It is one of the ways God has given the human race to show His redemptive work in the world, and to point us to the Great Physician. And that’s the reason why over the last three months, I’ve grown to love medicine again. Just thought I’d share.

Matthew 9:12

 

Advertisement