heavy

My heart feels so heavy with everything going on.  The pandemic.  The daily parade of human life with both love and tragedy, occasionally with some successes thrown in for another day.  I miss the sunshine.  I miss research.  I miss my old life.  Training in medicine is like eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil; my eyes have been opened, and once you know things - once you have seen people die, once you see multiple people die in ways both peaceful and awful - there will always be a certain gravity.

What the story from Genesis misses though is that it is not merely a tree of evil - there is good.  Knowledge of the pain in the world can lead to wisdom.  It can lead to a path to change.  Unlike the story of Genesis, the pain has always been there, and sometimes it was concealed.  A comfortable life can lead to meaninglessness and boredom.  Sometimes I think in a time like this pandemic, we have a strong purpose to our lives that pulls us forward in a way that we can change things.  I am lucky in that my training in both science and medicine has prepared me and given me an avenue to actually affect these problems in the world and try to bring something good from them.

I think being on nights, with sleep deprivation and the turning upside down of the world, that my emotions are bubbling under the surface closer than I wish to know.  Someone told me recently he thought I was fearless.  I have always wished to be brave, but mostly that just means managing the anxiety and fears that are always underneath the surface.  The good thing about growing up shy and anxious is that in overcoming the fear of talking to strangers, I kept overcoming fears and then overshot.

So here we are.  Back to the patients.