I’m going to write about this because it’s something I’ve
done before and it involves the funeral of a small animal on a sunny day while
the rest of the world buzzes by.
I didn’t want to see the seagull
stuck to the median, crumpled in a dusted heap between two rushing lanes of
traffic. But I did. I always seem to notice the suffering. Because of the
body’s location, it was going to stick there until a torrential rain washed it away
or a street sweeper, in spring, flung its body free. So I stood, as I so often
do, and thought about my life.
And my life right now is a bit chaotic. I was talking to a classmate this morning about our clinical
year—about how terrified we are to be pushed into roles we are both excited and
unprepared for. They call this the “imposter syndrome" in medical school. Because we
spend a lot of time wondering: Will the school, my preceptor, or the patients
discover that I don't know enough?
I’m in my family practice rotation;
my friend is in internal medicine. She told me nothing has humbled her more
than internal medicine. Where doctors walk around like “medical encyclopedias”
and the patients are so complex it’s hard to know what medications are helping
them and which are causing more side effects. My internal medicine rotation
is still somewhere down the road and I got a bit panicked by her panic.
Then I realized this is the
response we should have. We should be terrified. We should be in awe. The field of
medicine is enormous, intricate, but nowhere near fine-tuned. To have anything
but a healthy fear for what I am attempting to accomplish would be absurd.
There are so many things aside from medicine that heal and even if we don’t
always know the exact lab to order, dose to give, or diagnosis to hang our hat
on we can always fall back on something we do have to offer: Kindness. It has
been shown that human kindness--holding a hand, extra attention, empathy--has the ability to help patients heal faster, sometimes with absolutely no biological or scientific explanation as to why.
And that brings me back to the seagull, because even though I
whispered, “I’ll come back for you tomorrow; I’ll move you to the bushes where
you can rest in peace”, I couldn’t leave. It’s not ethical to compare birds to
humans but the sentiment is the same—we all deserve to receive the simple act of
kindness. So I sprinted back across the two lanes of traffic, grabbed a plastic
bag near a garbage can, ran back, waited for honking cars to pass, and collected up what I could. As I ran back across the road, I wanted
to cry not only for the absurdity of my act but also for the beauty of giving this
small creature a final resting place. Under a tree, facing Green Lake, with a
mound of dirt on its chest.
I told my
friend this, my internal medicine friend—and she is the friend I also count on to cheer me up, chuckle at my
antics, encourage my wayward ways even if she doesn’t understand them. She is
one of the many partners in crime I have through this medical maze—and she
surprised me, for once, by not laughing.
Instead, she paused, gave a heart felt sigh and said, “You know, the world
needs more people like you."
R.I.P., Dear seagull, and thank you for the lesson.
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