I've imagined myself being in the medical profession my whole life. When I was little I wanted to be a brain surgeon. And then a paramedic. And then a pediatrician. And then a neonatal nurse. My favorite show was Trauma: Life in the ER, and the first time I visited Baptist Hospital, I never wanted to leave. I wanted to explore and find the trauma and surgeries and sickness and organs and blood. My parents thought they'd given birth to the most morbid child.

Not even my own minor illnesses kill my fascination. Diagnoses have always evoked fascination and curiosity - never fear. In second grade I was out of school for a week because I was sick with a mysterious stomach flu, and even though I felt completely horrible, the only thing I looked forward to was the doctor visit. I asked if I could take the x-rays of my stomach home, and they're still laying on top of my fridge in a yellow envelope, buried beneath a collection of x-rays kidnapped from my parents' various doctor visits.

Sometimes I feel as if I must be just like Harold from Harold and Maude. He was obsessed with death - with funerals, hurses, and pretending to die - until he experienced death for real, and then he symbolically let his hurse drive itself over a cliff. Now that I'm older, I'm an employee at a hospital, have sick family members coming out of my ears, have experienced my own fair share of sickness, and I still haven't had that Harold moment where I realize that maybe human anatomy and medicine aren't so thrilling after all.

Still, other things keep me from the medical world. I have no faith in my chemistry abilities, no time for pre-med in my undergraduate career, the worst phobia of puke, and seeing other people's blood makes me dizzy. And, at least for right now, I love other things more. I'd rather be learning poetry and how the brain works, not organic chemistry. I still feel too young for that - like I need to grow more.

Maybe this means I don't love medicine enough to actually pursue it, or maybe it means I don't have enough faith in myself, or maybe it means I just really really hate puke. But things can get confusing when I walk through the hospital on my lunch break, completely in love with everything, asking why am I not doing pre-med? over and over and over and over again.


I just always want a hospital to go to. Not to be sick (although hospitals come in handy for that, too), but to be a tiny part of a huge science-obsessed community that experiences human nature at its rawest on a daily basis. I love the structure of the hospital, the shuttles that go all over the city, how official  the signs and maps inside seem (as if to say, "these are all the ways in which science has succeeded"), and how seeing a surgeon or a doctor walking around makes me feel like I'm seeing the president or a celebrity or really anyone who is extremely important. (And who could be more important, at least in a hospital?) 


Emergencies and operating rooms and codes and drugs all seem so thrilling. And so does being a detective who uses charts and symptoms and tests to find answers. But still, being where I am now, I have no clue how to get there. Or if it's really what I want (right now, knowing the brain as best as I can is really what I want). 


I'm convinced loving too many things can be a curse, especially when time is limited and education is expensive and people think you should know what you want to do by the time you're a senior in college.