finishing the eighth year

This is the last month of my eighth year the MD/PhD program. 

The PhD was intellectually more demanding, was filled with both uncertainty and creativity, and made me feel as if time was standing still.

The MD portion is mind-numbing, physically demanding, highly delineated, and makes me feel as if time is rushing by.  It has been a team endeavor, but rarely draws on the skills from my PhD.  It is much more about showing up than being clever.

I miss being a scientist.  Asking questions and seeking answers about the world is one of the best fits with my personality, but I spent much of the time feeling lonely and wondering if my work was meaningful.

In medicine, I do a lot of menial tasks that are highly important and meaningful to people's lives.  I am part of a team, feel that my work is meaningful, exercise empathy, communication, and teaching skills, but rarely do intellectual work.  Medicine is very much a craft more than a science.  I endure it, enjoy the unusual and dramatic experiences it gives, find it very emotionally satisfying/draining, and enjoy the camaraderie that I never really experienced in graduate school.

But I miss being a scientist.  I spend too much time rather bewildered that I am in medical school, not really envisioning myself as a physician.

I am a physician-scientist, or even more accurately, and scientist-physician.  I am in clinic to learn what is wrong and to find fodder for creativity.  I've come up with a research or other project from each rotation except surgery, but surgery is the only endeavor I enjoyed for its own sake.  I have no science, only the enjoyment of the thing itself.  It is visual, kinesthetic, appealingly clear-cut, but also appallingly old-fashioned and hierarchical, personality rather than evidence based.

But I would be a surgeon, very possibly, if I was not to be a scientist.  I enjoyed surgery in a way that I did not find medicine interesting.  It is making me a little sad that my surgery clerkship is coming to an end, even though the hours are tiring.  I like the people I work with, but even more, I enjoy getting to work with my hands.