Eight weeks of Freedom!

I am currently on my last of eight weeks of no clinical duties. Free as a bird! What did I do with my time off? Well, I'm an unusual bird....

This was supposed to coincide with interview seasons so that I wouldn't be interviewing while working at the hospital, but I actually only had two interviews at the beginning of this "Christmas break," so I've basically had the time off.

Half of this eight-week break was actually a stay-at-home elective with teaching duties for the second-years preparing for their STEP 1. The other four weeks were pure vacation. Interestingly (ahem), I have done almost none of the teaching duties (I guess I'll do that during those apparently free afternoons during anesthesiology and radiology). Instead, I've been doing other things I'm really interested in:

• Taking courses in four main methods of NFP: Coupe to Couple League, Marquette, Creighton, and Billings
  
• Giving presentations to medical students about NFP (one on Marquette, one on Creighton, and one on all the methods)
  
• Starting a research project! (Late in my med school career but early in my reseraching career.)
  
• Finishing up a required "Quality Improvement" study...basically a shell project for a required fluff course
  
• Continuing to work on the two inventions I'm helping with. Gah, these things move so slowly!
  
• Preparing a talk with FACTS to give to OB/GYNs and to eventually (hopefully) integrate in OB/GYN clerkships and residencies. I'm going to help give this presentation at the AAPLOG conference in February.
  
• Working with a medical illustrator to create the BEST fertility cycle chart EVER
  
• Playtesting a gamebook I wrote and vacillating about publishing it (email me if you want to help playtest, which means reading it and discovering all the mistakes I made)
  
• Planning for residency. I used to think I could float through life without much planning, but third year showed me that you can't float through 70+ hour work weeks without meal planning and aggressive prayer planning. Therefore I am planning a year of meals and a year of Scripture meditations. So much fun/work/screen-staring....

MedSFL: Pain.

I spoke with a recent acquaintance in the anatomy lab the other day. She is a secular humanist and recently attended a MedSFL event, where she very articulately questioned/opposed everything the speaker was saying. In lab, she told me frankly that she thinks everyone should have to bring in speakers on both sides of any "issue like that," to avoid misinformation and bias and to allow people to make their own decisions. She also spoke about how she was very upset about all the intolerance she saw in her classmates.

I was surprised that she could imply so bluntly that my event (a presentation by a pro-life doctor on abortion) was misinforming, since there was no one who held the contrary position. I was surprised that she could so unabashedly speak about intolerance. Because of my surprise, her words felt like a slap.

This isn't the first time I've been "slapped" in MedSFL. (For the record, I don't count angry emails from strangers as slaps, since they're much less in-your-face and they're to be expected.) A few months ago while I was planning the meeting the secular humanist attended, I contacted two women who I knew to be pro-life. They agreed to meet with me before the next event to talk about it. To my complete and sharp surprise, they sat me down and bluntly told me they both felt the same way: "Let's be clear: I don't do this pro-life action stuff." I am ready to attest that they had good intentions, but the approach left me seared and begging to ask them, "if you agree with me, why put me through such a wringer? Couldn't you just email back and say nicely, 'no, I can't help with the meeting, but I can come,' and leave it at that?"

At this point, I am really the only person in the group. The attitude of these two women, whose discernment I can admire, seems to be the attitude of others as well: "I already do other things. I don't want that label, 'pro-life.' It interferes with the way I live, the way I interact with others, and what I want to do (or think God wants me to do)."

Happily, one of the undergrads at this institution, a former officer in the undergrad pro-life group, is coming here next year and I can pass the torch to her. I'm so ready to be out of office...it's emotionally exhausting.

Fortnight of Frenzy?

If I survive the next two weeks, it will be a feat of incomparable scheduling gymnastics. Watch what's happening:

1. Sept 17: CMA meeting to decide if our local CMA-SS will be a chapter of the big CMA-SS (involves finances and money, etc yuck)
2. Sept 17-20: Lectures covered by Exam 2
3. Sept 20: MedSFL reception in Houston (I'm going for fundraising and networking) [too crazy]
4. Sept 21: Exam 2
5. Sept 24-27: Lectures covered by Exam 3
6. Sept 23: first (mandatory) meeting of bible study I signed up for
7. Sept 23: monthly Mass with CMA-SS members
8. Sept 25: MedSFL meeting at my school (big event I've been working on for about a year, or maybe since June 2011)
9. Sept 26-30: CMA Conference, at which I am presenting a poster. If it seems odd that I be in Minnesota at a conference and at home taking an exam, don't be confused, because...
10. Sept 25: I take Exam 3 early (four days after Exam 2)

In order to do this, I am studying Exam 3 material now. (It's awesome, it's all about cardiac conductivity; I just wish things were a little more spread out.) I'm grateful that I'm not in the anatomy lab, that I've been taught cardiac physiology at every level of my education since age 14, and that Our Lord is present in the Eucharist all the time, waiting for me to lay the head of my soul on his Heart when everything gets too hectic. 

Hopefully, this won't be a frenzied time, just a very, very busy one where I hang on to Christ's peace until the whirlwind is over.

A Report on the Vital Signs of the Profession of Medicine: We're sick, but we're Fighting it

I recently sent out a mass email inviting the entire College of Medicine and the entire College of Nursing to an event cohosted by the Bioethics club and Med Students for Life.

(Ooh, I hate sending out mass emails! The trauma of clicking "send" when you know four thousand people will receive the message makes me wince and shiver.)

As you can imagine for an event cohosted by a bioethics club and a pro-life group, the topic is slightly controversial. But this story isn't about the controversy stirred up by the speaker. Ho no! Just the name Med Students for Life generated this response from an unknown physician professor:

To imply, as the name of your organization does, that not all physicians are "for life" is ludicrous. Of course we are. That is why we became physicians--to preserve life. But while I do not personally perform abortions, I do support a woman's right to make decisions regarding her health and what happens to her body. Why not simply call yourselves Medical Students Against Abortions? Or is that not sufficiently charged politically?

Obviously MedSFL has no problem getting enough political charge.

The doctor has a beautiful point, though: doctors preserve life. I was just talking with my probably-pro-choice classmate this morning about how doctors want to make things better. We were speaking about our Humanities selectives and I mentioned that my professor seems like the typical lawyer: he talks fast and a lot, he is opinionated, his vocabulary is sophisticated yet peppered with profanity, and he mentioned in one breath that he had a taste for social work and a taste for blood (meaning the figurative blood of the people he grills in courts). He's a divorce and child welfare lawyer, and acknowledges that half his time is spent tearing families apart. Yikes.

My classmate and I were musing, 'thank goodness we belong to a profession that most people enter to put things back together, to preserve and protect.' So this doctor hits the nail on the head: doctors enter medicine to preserve life.

I'm sorry that this doctor does not feel that the unborn patient falls under our professional jurisdiction, but I don't need to spend space rebutting his position (even though the decision to abort is in over 90% of cases not pertinent to a woman's health and is in 100% not pertinent to her body alone--oh, oops), nor do I need to demonstrate that "against abortion" is not the same as truly "pro-life" (when a consistent ethic of life, i.e. being pro-person and pro-human dignity across all ages, races, abilities, etc is the core any good pro-life group like MedSFL--oops again).

I calmly replied, apologizing for any hurt he felt and gently explaining that our group's name is not designed to degrade doctors, but is meant to encompass a consistent care for unborn patients, pregnant women, and women for whom pregnancy would be dangerous or inconvenient. Calmly as my words seemed, I was a little shaken by the vitriol. Aren't we supposed to be evidence-based people? People eager to hear lectures and read papers, providing that they're scientifically rigorous? Aren't we supposed to let the little things (like student organization names) slide? And would you send something like that in response to an invitation?

Moreover, I was surprised at the age of the argument, that a woman's body is her domain. According to research by Charles Kenny and the Right Brain People (not the political right, the neurological right) showed that women realize that a fetus is alive and has a right to life, but that killing that life is the least of three evils they face when caught in an unplanned pregnancy.

So the email disturbs me on several counts: first, it admits that our profession preserves life while defending the opposite (it's inconsistent); second, it displays a sort of uncharacteristic emotionalism not accepted elsewhere in the profession but routinely accepted on this issue; third, it exhibits outdated perceptions of female patients in a profession allergic to anything outdated and chauvinist. It appears that medicine, not unlike the legal profession, is sick.

Oh, I told myself, at least we're not sick unto death, like the profession of law. Then that the doctor sent a reply to my reply to inform me that "what [I was] saying is that [I] want to impose [my] value system on all patients. But," he asked me, "are you going to force a Jehovah's Witness with a life-threatening GI bleed to accept a blood transfusion? Of course not. You are against abortion. Fine. Then call your organization what it is. Medical Students Against Abortion." I did not reply to this one.

The profession of medicine has a stage IIB (of IV) cancer and we're starting some aggressive chemotherapy. Young doctors and medical students are dragging speakers into their med schools and demanding that others look at the issue and think consistently (drat the decline of liberal education). Check out MedSFLA's fall tour schedule and their 2013 Conference and see what I mean.

This has been your report on the profession of medicine's vital signs. We're sick, but we're fighting it!