Art I

What happened to art? I used to play the viola and read voraciously. At one time, I studied philosophy, loved history, enjoyed musicals and plays. Now, I surround myself with textbooks and charts and Internet follies. For the last four years, medical school has dominated my life, and now I'm trying to push back. I think the path of the medical student funnels us into greater and greater specialization until we lose perspective of what's important in this world. For some students, residents, and attendings, medicine is what they do; they have precious little beyond that. But I refuse to fall into that trap; I fight to keep writing blogs and stories and poems. Before bed, I read for fun. The dance group I'm in reconstructs historic dances from the Victorian and Ragtime eras, complete with costuming. My nightstand has novels stacked on them; some even have bookmarks at a respectable distance into the book.

Here's the problem. There's a considerable amount to learn to become competent in medicine. The premed curriculum gets larger each year. Medical knowledge is expanding at an exponential pace; textbooks are being constantly revised, and by the time one edition is published, it's already out of date. There's an infinite amount of information to learn, and for those interested, an infinite number of questions to be investigated. Medicine is a black hole of erudition to which great clinicians and academics disappear. It's wonderful, it's fascinating. I signed up for a life of learning and I love it.

But what about everything else? How much of our lives outside medicine do we sacrifice? I have a dozen ongoing projects and ideas for a dozen more. Here is one project that has been on indefinite hold. I first started learning to code in elementary school on the operating system Turbo BASIC (sixth grade) and moved onto coding on the TI-83 graphing calculator (ninth grade; calculators were perfect because your math teacher just thought you were working) to C++ (junior year of high school) to Java (senior year of college). I love programming; I love thinking of cool applications to write and putting them into action. I could have easily gone into computer science. I still have a ton of ideas to try, and I tell myself when things get less busy, I'll open up the old compilier. But up until now, things have just been too hectic. Perhaps this year, with the flexibility of fourth year scheduling, I can start again. It takes a little impetus, but it's important. "But at my back I always hear / Time's winged chariot hurrying near." That, of course, is from Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress", and tomorrow's post will be on poetry and writing.