Hummers, SUVs and Honda Civics

I drive a 1999 Honda Civic with a gigantic dent in the passenger door. That dent, like most of the dents in our lives, has a history. About ten years ago, in Fort Collins, Colorado, I was side swiped by a blue car on my way to a party. The car didn’t stop. My friend Big Smiley and I gave chase to write down the license plate number. About 5 miles and 75 mph hour later (through town), we had enough information to go to the police. An investigation ensued because the driver of that car denied running into me (even with my car’s silver paint smeared on the bumper) and also didn’t have car insurance. There wasn’t much I could do and somewhat forgot about it, deciding I didn’t have the funds at the time to bother fixing it. About a year later I finally received a check in the mail, enough to fix the door. I promptly took that $1,000, deposited it in the bank, and bought a ticket to New Zealand instead.

I bring this up now because one of the prominent surgeons I work with knows me only as the “girl with the dent in her car.” She drives a convertible. I know this because before I knew she was a doc I was going to work with regularly we had a conversation about reckless driving, accidents, and people with SUVs. When she mentioned she had a small sports car, I quipped that she should get a Hummer.

I’ve been rounding in the hospital with the surgical service this entire weekend, and I really (really) like rounding. It’s when I get to see the patients off the surgical table, awake, pink cheeked, sitting up, recovering. I usually meet them in the OR, after the anesthesia has kicked in. Sometimes I scrub in after the procedure has begun and I am only met with a few inches of skin until there is a space enough in the operation to ask, “Who is this patient?” These are things I should know prior but often times my preceptor shuffles me into a cool or unique case because he wants me to see the anatomy, and the techniques, and gain a broader experience in the short month that I’m here.

This weekend, the topic of cars kept coming up. One of the patients—my first patient, the one I have seen all the way from pre-op through surgery and for 5 days in the hospital afterward—is being discharged tonight. She was as happy to leave as I was kind of sad to see her go. It's amazing how kindred one becomes to a complete stranger after spending nearly a week together in a hospital...She told me about her best friend who is a nurse, and how she talks to this friend regularly about her ailments. I told her I am often that “medical friend”—diagnosing friends and family with this or that, whipping out my stethoscope and otoscope (for the ears) at the slightest cough or sniffle. She mentioned that must get old, having people calling or asking me about medical stuff all the time. And I thought about that, because I have always somewhat been this friend, even before I began studying medicine.

I tried to explain it to her this way: I used to get really frustrated with mechanics. I don’t know enough about cars to know if I’m being swindled. Do I need a Johnson rod replaced? What is that and is that even a real thing? I used to want to study up on cars, on engines, so I would know a bit, like my brothers and dad do, about what it takes to fix them. But then a mechanic friend told me, “Find what you love to do and stick to that. Find a good mechanic that you can trust and don’t worry about knowing everything under the hood. Let us take care of your car.“ That resonated with me because I reckon my love of medicine, and sharing what I learn, is similar to anyone who is excited to teach something they love to do. I imagine my love of medicine is similar to someone who likes to work with cars and I find comfort, I guess, in the fact that most mechanics probably don’t know much about medicine. Therefore, they have to trust me too.

During the middle of this quiet revelation, the surgeon found me, the convertible. She had been rounding with my preceptor, who rides a bike. Us three shuffled around the hospital all morning, at the same pace, arriving at conclusions at different times, using our own unique neural pathways but with a similar thought trajectory. Because this is how we are trained. When I was allowed to pull a few chest tubes out of a patient who had drains from a major thoracic (heart and lungs) surgery, my preceptor said, “I don’t usually let students do this.” And the convertible quipped, “Why not? She's a superstar, she has a dent in her car, she has been around the block a few times. Literally.”

Used car or not, dent or no dent, I’m taking that as a damn fine compliment.