The Making Of A Cyborg, M.D.
Specialty training is meant to break doctors. I am not just saying it because I came out with pieces of me barely clinging to my soul, but because I came out beating the odds. Salvaging scraps of my humanity before they get incinirated by a corrupted system wasn’t easy.
It’s not just the outdated training programs that are to be conquered in residency, but the entire horrific scenario of pain, sufferings and death, interlaced with humiliations, deprivations, and endless, thankless hard work. A condition that is so inhumane that even the strongest of spirits crample.
Medicine is a titan’s world, a war zone. It is a place uninhabitable to just any person. It is a world requiring a whole lot of madness. It’s an assembly line, where humans are made into mutants, - assembled piece by piece - into something with barely a touch of humanity.
I am a product of that assembly line, and then I became one of the “little gods”, breaking fellow human beings, tearing them very slowly, a piece at a time, or blowing them up all together.
I tinker with their minds and souls, until they come out just right, - like Cyborgs with an M.D., PCP, PSMID, PPS, or whatever comes after a name to signify “ completion of mutation”.
Sometimes, If I try not to rationalize, I find my contributions to the rut regrettable, but I am just another dot in a system full of nameless dots.
The first few months during my first year of residency, I’d run to the fire exit and cry my heart out, just because I can still do so; because I still have lots of tears left; because I can still feel. The tears dried up fast.I was skinned alive. Soon I learned that to feel is to fail. Compassion is weakness. I was transformed.
Knowledge used to be comfort, and so I’d try to find enlightenment in my books, unfortunately, none could ever explain how horror can be conquered. The books I once thought to be all knowing, the pages holding all the answers, are as blank as a dead man’s stare.
The principles are written down, but not the essence. Never the essence.
A lot of souls get lost, and get devoured inside the untamed forest of medical training. Eventually, getting lost and getting devoured become all too common. There are those who get out seemingly the same, but such is a rarity it’s almost an anomaly.
Shedding old skin and getting new coarser, thicker ones are as routine as wrestling with death; of breathing sufferings; of listening to pain. As we settle into a life in training, we claim a new persona we never thought we’d ever become, - cold, detached, barely human.
Soon enough, the humanity in us is replaced by rigid objectivity. Humans become case numbers, faceless and nameless, devoid of unique personality. They become puzzles or riddles to be solved, among many others. As we become Cyborgs marching to war, our patients became subjects, and their demise mere shallow scratches, where it had once been bullet holes.
Now that I have re- claimed my right to have my call for time, I often find myself invoking the humanity in me, like calling upon a long lost soul hidden behind layers of armours I have been trained to wear like second skin, with every patient I see.
It takes a while, but I could still feel a faint pulsing in my heart. Maybe, just maybe, I can still be revived.
