A Seasonal Reversal

I started my first clinical rotation the weekend after what used to be my wedding anniversary. Sept 24th. Two days into Fall and weather that makes you believe in an almighty something. I always think of this time of year as the culmination. The result of a winter’s worth of planning and the hot months spent enacting it. Gaining experience and disasters along the way. Finding those “one percenters” for next season – the slivers of improvement in every corner. I also think of it as a time of relief and release. The workload gets lighter as the crops get heavier - cabbage, sweeties, frost kissed beets, little jewels to fill the fortress of your root cellar.

Yet this year, this time marks a beginning. A transition too, but a real moment of budding. Oddly out of season but a culmination in many ways as well. I’ve spent 2 weeks in the OR. An environment completely devoid of natural light, and with it, a sense of time. We used to have a poster scribbled with a bountiful field that read “Farming: A Job Outside.” I would giggle at its obviousness. Perhaps I should paint its opposite and string it across the OR walls (without breaking the sterile field of course).

Speaking of my fingers have never been cleaner. I came across a poem my sibling, then sister, wrote to me, about me, after visiting the farm I was managing a year after college. At its core it touched on my identity. My assuredness and comfort in a hoop house full of tomatoes 15’ high and my ease in marching through acres of Brussels sprouts, eyeing down only those most ready to be plucked.

It’s hard for me to think of that confidence as only naïveté and strange to feel envious of it now, 7 years and a lifetime later. And yet, I’m now searching for exactly that feeling, that “click.” In many ways it feels obvious that my twenties should be nothing but tumultuous, but I still am left with some shock at the stark difference in moments, only a few years apart.

My little sibling now tattoos strangers and friends out of their apartment in a deep corner of Brooklyn. Their arms are nearly covered with little dancers and vases and swirls. They’re getting top surgery next week. They’ve had more hair styles before turning 25 than I ever will. My sibling has always been a beacon for change, disruption, flipping over the status quo. Not with violence or chaos, but with proud and independent steps and a defiant voice that lilts up at the end of each sentence - a protest with a hint of doubt and kindness. I graduated college early, left for a life of farming, and married not long after I could legally drink. My sibling is fearless and funny and one of the people I look up to the most. In fact, they’re the one who pushed me to pursue medicine in the first place, on a long beach walk one summer when I found myself yet again, antsy. They’ve always taken the approach that change is inevitable, good, and needed. They will, and have, died on some absurd hills to not comprise their point.

In this new and utterly foreign environment I’m trying to find my footing. Find a new reflection that still looks like myself in a place and pace that could not feel more different. Who is the physician I want to become? And how does she still contain the grubby little farmer girl I love? On paper I try to connect these two “me’s” but in my mind they remain separate. Detached and searching for each other to feel that deep sense of grounding again. I want to not feel blood frozen awkward in these new spaces.

And I know some of this comes with time.

My former wedding band was inscribed with the same phrase I’d actually painted on my wall, “Practice Patience.” So, I trust the skills will come. But what I’m searching for more so is that new sense of identity. Of feeling rooted in what you do, where you are, and the people that fill your days and your cup right up. When does it start to feel like less of a role to play right and more of an intrinsic sense of being?

I learned how to suture on warm human flesh for the first time this week. How to bring two parts of skin together again through flicks of a needle just a hair below the surface of the epidermis. I’ve watched 5 prostates be removed from 5 different men this week. How at the end of each surgery a whole part of this human is removed (in a small bag stitched closed nonetheless). 44 grams that was once part of this man, now sitting on the table. In the aftermath though always comes the anastomosis. The final step to the procedure is to bring together two distant parts and make a whole. Forming a new tunnel and path seamlessly deep within the body cavity. There’s an elegance to this. This connection that seems forced at first suddenly joins together, becoming water-tight in the end.

I feel like I’m still waiting in the shadows when it comes to medicine. Still feeling like the little girl at her mom’s bedroom door too afraid to approach, too scared to say what I want or need. I’m not sure how that once confident 21-year-old turned so shy again.

Yes, I am new to this. Yes, humility can take you far. And yet, I am still a whole person with feelings and opinions and experiences that are meaningful to me, my career, and the community I want to build. Perhaps saying this, or writing this, can make it feel an inch more real. That my past self can come to know my current and the two can be friends, conspirators even.

But for now, I will do as they say and “sleep while I can.” Trying to hold this flicker in my heart as I step into the next ice cold OR or buzzing patient room.

I am not two humans with start and end dates. I am continuous and continuing and hope to spend this new reverse season doing what I know I do best. Observing, gathering information, taking haphazard notes on scraps of paper, trying and retrying, finding corners of efficiency, shared smiles at unexpected moments, and those little one percenters that make the next go round one inch better.

This, I know I can do.