Someone else revisited

Some five years ago, I wrote a column in our high school newspaper about a fatal car accident (The Search - Thanksgiving). Though I only knew the young woman's name from glancing at my sister's tennis tournament draws, hearing the news of her death while still a teenager was nonetheless a jarring thought.

In that comic (it was part of a two week-long sequence in which Calvin's house gets robbed while they are attending a wedding), Calvin's parents touched on something that I've long since internalized. It's a rather morbid rationale, but I think one of the main reasons I can push myself to keep working hard year after year is because of the fear that something irrationally tragic could always happen to me. True, I still can't imagine myself getting stabbed by a  deranged college dorm roommate, but I'm sure that neither could George Chen (one of the victims of the Isla Vista shootings/stabbings who was from my high school graduating class). These sorts of things happen, and to be honest, I'm not so sure if there's that much we can really do once the situation presents itself.

In any event, the "punchline" of that column was that we rarely see ambulances screaming down the street and stop to wonder about the people behind the situation -- does John, the father riding along in the backseat, root for the Red Sox or the Yankees? Does Michael, the middle child with his tibia jutting out of his leg...does Michael have friends at school?

Invariably, everyone riding along in the ambulance is a human being with a story worth telling. But as far as commuting drivers and their passengers are concerned, the distinctive sound of a blaring ambulance merely means to look all around your car to first identify the source, then to adjust your position as needed to allow the ambulance through.

I realize this is a rather inane idea, that we should stop to think about the stories and thoughts that are also riding along in the backseat of those ambulances. Yet from a young age, for some reason I used to picture myself as the patient riding in the ambulance or as an onlooking family member worrying whether my child, spouse or relative would be okay. You could argue that it was simply a product of my imagination and role-playing tendencies, but I think on some level, I knew and recognized the humanity of the situation -- of an ambulance frantically blasting through traffic, inconveniencing many lives but saving lives as well.

So no, I don't believe that I have the most riveting explanation for why I developed an interest in medicine, and that's fine with me. But whether I'm changing the media for iPSCs from cystic fibrosis patients, watching ambulances pull into Mass General while I'm pushing patients around in wheelchairs, or watching an ENT surgeon excise a tumor from someone's larynx, I always try to remember that there are stories behind the people that I'm ultimately trying to help.  It's the aspect of humanity that makes medicine more than just the science of the human body.

After all, one day that patient riding in the ambulance may very well be me.