Last week I sat across from one of my students at my desk in the internal medicine office and he told me stories. He told me that he left medical school two years ago after completing his third of five, because he wasn’t doing very well. Academically, financially, personally, fill in the blank. He was struggling. When I asked what he had been doing the past two years he told me he’d been on the streets, “just fighting”. I still don’t know if he meant it literally.
He came to me that day because his return to school this year wasn’t going much better. He was barely keeping up on the wards. I’d frequently see him lost during group discussions, blankly staring, absent as his fellow students leaned in with interest and intent, a medical career in their sights.
As I spent time with him that day in my office I learned more about the young man who’s silence I had previously mistaken for disinterest. He has a rugged face with deep-set weathered eyes and for a slender man, broad shoulders. He is soft spoken, kind, striving, with a quiet deprecating chuckle. And although not every student here has been dealt a raw hand, he most certainly has.
He lives a nearly two hours bus ride from school because he doesn’t have to pay rent there. He wakes at 4am to make it to the hospital on time and returns home after dark. He told me he tries to study on the bus but frequently can’t find a seat, and it is hard to read a textbook while standing. He stays up late to study and then sleeps for a few hours before he tries it all over again. From my side of the desk I could see the hope fading from his tired eyes as these realities added up to a nearly insurmountable burden, not unlike they had two years before.
After he left my office that day I turned my music back on and a song called Burden, by Foy Vance, was playing. “Come to me my brother, and I will sit with you awhile”, the song goes. “Pretty soon I’ll see you smile cause you know you will. No matter how much you’re hurting right now you know that everything will change in time. Let me carry your burden O brother mine.” Most days I might dismiss such a message as simple or even trite. But that day it nearly brought me to tears.
I wanted so badly not to carry my student’s burden but to crush it into a million pieces. To shatter it and give him a chance. Maybe a seat on the bus or better yet a room in the student hostel next door. Maybe a good night’s sleep or just any sleep at all. But as is often the case, it was abundantly and painfully obvious to me that it just doesn’t work like that. And sometimes what is left for me is to sit with him awhile.
So each week we discuss a clinical case he prepares, sometimes in hushed tones, other times excitedly. Sometimes it is with a certain degree of exasperation because progress is slow, clawing back those years lost, catching up, “just fighting”, until that day we both know is coming when everything will change, in time.
I love this Liv. The answer is not despair. The answer is hope. The answer is not retreat. The answer is speaking to/living in your highest angels. And sharing that space with others.