People who go to med school

A lot if people who go to med school are those who, in my opinion, should never go there in the first place.

Mostly, the motive is impure. It's on the cute side when the motive is "I wanna get rich". In my case, I think I just wanted to slice people open. Of course, when I was little I probably was burning with this high spirit to save people's lives, but that was when I was three. Now that I'm 17, no such thing remains in my mind; it was out of sick and sadistic desire that I applied to a med school.

If that was it, it's not too bad. The most I see is "I wanted to look clever", "I wanted to change people's lives", "I wanted to play god", which is extremely close to insanity.

If it was just the motives, there's still salvation. What's even worse is that there are many people who are just not suitable to medicine from the ability or mental stability. And you find them everywhere.

My high school is probably one of the best in the area, and we have two who are going to private school pre-meds (I'm already in medical school so I'm out of count). Well, I'm not proud of my school, but compared to other schools around it's dramatically better. It's not easy to get into pre-med, so it's a good thing, I guess. Now, let me introduce you to the two young pre-meds who were my classmates.

One is a Spain-born Spanish. Both parents graduated from the school of medicine at the University of Barcelona. Very smart. Since he's the elder boy, both parents expect much from him. He gets pretty good grades, and he works hard. He was in my chemistry class, and since I rarely attended classes he was a good friend to borrow notes from.

But...

When he was little, he told me, he wanted to be a cook. Both parents adamantly were against it, and he gave up his dream. His current future career is a cardiologist. For me, cooking and cutting up hearts were pretty much the same thing, so I thought maybe it was going to be okay. That was last summer, when classes just began and I didn't know him too well.

But as classes progressed, I began to worry if I could trust the heart let alone cooking, and it began to bloat. He happens to be extremely careless and clumsy. For the proof, my chem class was given two boxes of Pyrex test tubes from Procter and Gamble, because the CEO of Procter and Gamble was my school's alumnus. For them, they were probably just giving away some junk that was sitting in the storage, but for us, getting nice, good expensive test tubes is a happy thing.

The first day we used those test tubes, our dear Mr. Clumsy managed to break two of them. Not only that... it was on a different day but he managed to burn half my classmate's tie. He repeatedly caused similar accidents.

"Erm... if I got some heart attack, I'd rather die than have him treat me," I thought, and I'm sure you'd understand why. But apparently college admissions don't really care about those things, and he got into pre-med with no trouble.

Another person is an US - born American. He was in my fifth year diff. eq and English class Senior year (since I took summer pre-cal, we were a year ahead). He looks like what President Clinton might have looked like in high school, and he acts like him too, if a little more vulgar. He sucked at English, and was constantly the class duck. He also happened to get 18 out of 80 on one of the English tests. Of course, he just grinned and let it go. He was the captain of the golf team and was apparently a good scorer at the state tournament. He told me he started golf when he was three.

He was a normal student at first. But when we were Seniors, he began to show his true colors. First of all, he had a wild party with drinking at his house and got arrested. Then he got pulled over in Florida for speeding. In the end, he got drunk, got talked into by a friend to get a tattoo, and went ahead and did it. Apparently this tattoo looked awful - you know the kind that you seen on ramen bowls in Chinatown? Those. He said it was pretty painful.

This idiot's aspiration is COSMETIC SURGERY. I couldn't stop my mouth and asked him:

"Is that to get rid of your tattoo?"

He gestured around his thigh and said, "Like this?"

"Yep."

"Duh."

A year ahead of me was a dude who got straight into medical school - the same school as the tattoo boy. This one was weird as well - he had no friends. His parents gave him a complete inventive education in sciences, and he completed Calculus freshman year. He is OCD and probably paranoid in some bizzarre way; during lunch when I was a junior, he always went up the stairs right by the place where I was waiting for my teacher to arrive. Well, he just HAD to go up the left side of the right staircase, and if someone was there, he'd come back down and start over again. I was with him during the math team, and not once have I seen him laugh. He originally wanted to go to engineering, and got into CalTech, but he decided to refuse the offer and go to med school. To me, he would have been better off going to engineering. Medicine is something more than "fixing", after all; it's healing, with mental and spiritual care. But before we even talk about him thinking patients as humans, he needs to work on recognizing himself as a human.

Then there's me. One day in math class, the tattoo boy asked me what I wanted to do after med school.

"Brain surgeon."

"Why?"

"Well, first of all, my patients are all knocked out, so they won't talk back. Second of all, it looks fun."

His expression became really tense and he said, "you know, you'd probably fix the problem but you'd probably change the patient's personality as well."

Considering the fact that these kind of people will take care of so many people's health and welfare and possibly change their lives, I'm feeling a little cold. But then, I find myself that I just need to be careful to the doctor I go to; after all, I won't be my own patient. There must be some moral physician somewhere, right? I just need to find him.

By the way, lectures at Kings College London will start from 24th of September. I'll see you then.