Hurricane Jill

If I were making a mistake, I would know it by now

When I was about a semester into pharmacy school, I got a job working as an IV tech in a hospital pharmacy. At the time, I was also about knee deep in campus politics (not yet up to my eyeballs, as I would later become), had just disentangled myself from my biggest relationship mistake ever, and was living with a roommate who would become one of my best friends in college. My parents looked like they were going to get back together, and I was doing pretty well in my classes. Life was good.

Except I was having second thoughts about pharmacy. I was not like the other students in my class. I was not from a small town. I had not gone to junior college. I did not still wear bows in my hair and dress up for class like it was pledge week at the sorority house. I did not wear a multi-carat rock on my left hand. And I was not politically conservative, or a fundamentalist Christian. I remember sitting in class one day thinking, “who are these people, and am I going to be dealing with colleagues like this the rest of my career?” The idea was very disturbing.

So started watching the pharmacists at my work. I listened to what they talked about, and tried to understand what their lives were like, and paid attention to the scope of their daily activities. It was the fall semester at that time, and by the following spring, I knew I had made a huge mistake. But I was already in pharmacy school, and I couldn’t face the thought of how many years it would take to drop out and do something else. Not to mention that I had no idea what else to do.

Add to this the fact that my health professions advisor had told me, before I ever even applied to pharmacy school, that I struck him as more suited to medicine than pharmacy. But I replied that no medical school would consider a student with my grades, and he agreed. Still he tried to get me to take classes that were pre-med and not really pre-pharm, like anatomy, and the lab where we had to dissect a fetal pig. But I just wasn’t ready to go that route at the time.

And I still wasn’t, three semesters into pharmacy school.

So I did what any student so involved in campus life would do: I went to the career counseling center for help. I knew about it because a friend of mine had worked there, and he recommended one counselor in particular as very talented and helpful. So I went to see her, and explained my situation, and how I had no idea what to do with my life. She had me take a couple of tests to determine my personality type, and my interest in and subjective sense of skill at various activities. In the meantime, she asked me a bunch of questions about myself and my background.

I remember one in particular–she wanted to know who my heroes were.

“What do you mean, heroes?” I said.
“Someone you admire, whom you want to be just like,” she said.
“There isn’t anyone,” I said.
She said, “You need to find a hero, someone you can use as a role model.”
I told her that made no sense to me. “Everyone has their flaws,” I said, “and most people have admirable qualities, even if on the whole I don’t like them.”

This was clearly not the answer she was expecting. But she acknowledged that this was probably correct, and said that perhaps I could instead identify someone whom I mostly admired and follow in their footsteps. I said that was all well and good if you can find someone like that, but I hadn’t run across anyone whose life I wanted mine to be like.

I knew I was being difficult, and yet I wasn’t lying or exaggerating. Seriously, were most people unable to solve on their own the kind of problems amenable to such simpleminded advice? There was no dearth of people willing to serve as my mentor, the problem was that I didn’t want what any of them wanted for me.

She did say one thing that I found helpful, and it was that getting a pharmacy degree didn’t mean I had to be a pharmacist. And that even getting a license and working as one didn’t mean I had to be a pharmacist my whole life. I could use it to support myself on the road to becoming something else, and it wasn’t strictly necessary to figure out right now what that something else would be.

Nonetheless, it was clear from this discussion that I would need to obtain a graduate degree in something. So things went along for a few semesters as I explored various options for postgraduate education.

Mostly as a result of false advertising, I eventually tracked into the doctoral program in pharmacy. The administration at my school made the career options sound a lot like the practice of medicine, and I still wasn’t ready to think about medicine itself. But the closer to a medical curriculum our lectures became, the more interested I was in the subject matter. And then on our clinical rotations it was painfully obvious that I was interested in everything about medicine except the drugs. I felt like an incompetent idiot most of the time, and I just couldn’t make myself care. Everyone was convinced I would fail my licensure exam and disgrace the school. But as it turned out, I had one of the higher scores that year.

So I graduated, and got a job. Three months after getting my license, I realized that the doctoral degree did nothing to mitigate the overall mistake of pharmacy school. If anything, it made things worse. As I later found out, my school had a reputation for producing aggressive clinicians. People who were vastly overtrained for even the widest scope of practice allowed to a pharmacist. These were people who took pathophys with the med students, and outperformed them on their own tests.

Anyway, I bit the bullet, and decided to go to med school. It was very difficult to get anyone even to look at my application, but eventually I got in. And now, here I am, almost a year into residency, and I know it was the right decision.

Why do I bring this up? Because there’s a resident here who is switching out of neurosurgery. He told me back in November that he was thinking about it, but asked me not to say anything, so I didn’t. I thought at the time that it was a reaction to the crappy treatment he was getting from his fellow residents. And I felt somewhat guilty for the fact that I actually got along with them pretty well, and was having a great time on the rotation. I also wondered if I would suddenly be picked on and mocked mercilessly next year if I were the PGY2, despite getting along with everyone now.

But I recently heard via the grapevine that he had actually been having second thoughts, even during his intern year. And that made me feel better, because I’m done with my neurosurgery rotations for the year, and I have none whatsoever.

So what’s the point? Well, it’s this: people know very quickly when they’ve made a mistake. They may drag things out for a while, trying in every way possible to salvage the time and effort they’ve already spent. In fact, some people never have the courage to back up and change course, and so they learn to live with being less happy than they might have been. Or they find other things to distract them from their unhappiness. But if something is a mistake, you know it, pretty much as soon as you start down the path.

It took a lot of guts for that resident to get out of neurosurgery at this point in training. But it was the right choice for him. Really, –and I wish someone had told me this when I was 22– if you can’t stand the taste of lemonade, don’t waste your time making it. Just give the lemons back.