Meditation 4: There's No Crying in Jeopardy

Sometimes, I sit in my classes and wonder what it would be like if patients could see videos of their doctors in medical school. I think of the people in my lab group who get 6 or more hemostats connected to them without their knowledge. I think of all of the people sleeping through important biochem lectures, like the TCA cycle. I think of myself and of Joe, making livers into Portuguese Man of Livers, talking our way through lecture after lecture, with brief periods interspersed through which I draw on Jacob's notes.

But, sometimes, I also think of the videos they would see of the humorless ones, the lonely gunners, the "super serial" ones who sit outside the library with books during lunch. The ones who are always so sure they are right. The ones who don't think that anything about life--and much less, med school--is funny.

Humorlessness is a great danger. The worst danger. Humorlessness takes manageable situations and turns them into misunderstandings. Humorlessness hurts people's feelings, misconstrues facts, makes an unpleasant environment from all.

The humorless ones are the ones who will never be able to have completely easy conversations with their patients. The lonely gunners, for all their knowledge, will not know what to say. Having eaten all their lunches alone, perhaps they lose some of the art of great conversation.

There are some things that pure knowledge will never be able to replace. I would rather have the laughing doctor that checks her facts in the book than the one who doesn't laugh, who knows that all of her knowledge is spot-on. That's the type of doctor I would rather be too.

So, if we can ever travel back in time, I hope one day my patients will see me in medical school, laughing through medical jeopardy with my friends, coming completely undone as the phrase "Phallic Stage!" is used as a curse word and resonates through the air.