scientia-rex:
It’s a very weird feeling to finally, after literal decades of working towards becoming an unstoppable juggernaut, finally find myself at a point where other people are also realizing that I’m becoming an unstoppable juggernaut. But they never see the potential still remaining! They look at me where I am at now, a rural doc who can change clinic policies that affect thousands of patients by virtue of being one of a handful of docs willing to work out here, and they say, wow, it’s so great that you’re using your influence like this! And I’m sitting here going you think this is IT? You think I’m going to stop here? You really think, after all that very literal blood and sweat and tears, I’m going to say, well, that’s enough. I got one clinic to do a training. I wrote a couple of articles. I got a few doctors to reconsider their approaches. Hell no! I’m still climbing. I’m still pushing. I’m consolidating my solid ground. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and the short-sightedness of so much ambition—do you have any idea how much you hamstring yourself by it? Give yourself time! Give yourself ten years, twenty years, thirty years. Build something massive. Build a fortress that a few weak slings and arrows can’t take down. I put in the work every day since I started med school right and a half years ago, I’ve made myself virtually unfireable, and I’m still at the beginning of my career. It isn’t sexy to show up every day and do the petty and menial tasks as well as the grand ones, to eat shit from smug old white straight cis men who think having a cardiologist AND an orthopedist on a committee counts as “diversity,” to have to plan when you can cry and when you can poop to avoid making your team angry—but now I’m the fucking attending. Now I get to say, “I want it like this,” and people listen. I get to start righting some of these massive systemic wrongs—just little ones, tiny ones. But if I start working on the pipelines for rural docs, for people of color who want to be doctors, on opinion pieces that a small handful of people read, on textbook chapters used to train a new generation how to think, on residency policies, I can start chipping away at this huge edifice of Modern Medicine that once seemed impenetrably white and male and straight and cis. I trained with a trans woman who’s a doctor now. I trained with a non-binary doctor in residency. My residency class had more doctors of color than white doctors. Things ARE changing and they are changing because we MAKE them change. Because we show up every day with a ball peen hammer, like Andy Dufresne at Shawshank, and we are chiseling our way to toppling this edifice. The more I work, the longer I build up this social capital, the more people in the community I make nice with, the more I network, the bigger the changes I can make.
Years ago in residency I wrote a poem and I said “I am throwing my whole life against the glass to see it shake”—we worked on the ninth floor, with huge windows, in an oddly squalid wing—and I am still doing that. It’s wild and joyful. See what change I can make. Fling myself at it. Throw myself at the ground and miss.