On Thanksgiving, outside of my parent’s home in New Hampshire, my fiancée
Martha and I play with my niece Audrey, who is now almost 2 years old. She has
blue eyes, light brown hair with little curly wisps of hair that are starting to form
over her ears. She wears rainbow boots, pink pants, and a fancy, navy blue puffy-
jacket that her mother definitely doesn’t want to get dirty. I pick her up and place her on top of the slide of the playhouse my father built for us when we were
kids. The slide itself is sturdy but dirty from the years outside. “Audrey, don’t
move. Wait until I’m at the base of the slide.” She nods while smiling with a big
grin, excited to make her way down the slide for the thirtieth time. “Go!” I hold
my arms up ready to catch her. She zooms down the slide, and I snatch her as she
makes it to the bottom, right before she falls off the slide. “Muh! Muh!” She
pleads pointing to the top of the slide. By this point, I’m a bit tired, but I indulge
her, placing her back on top of the slide knowing this is one of the rare moments I
am home to play with her. She slides down again, I catch her, and plop her on the
ground. She finally tires of the slide and walks away looking for her next
adventure, her pink pants covered in dirt from the slide.
The weekend before returning home to see my family for Thanksgiving, I was in
the medical school library studying the endless amount of drugs we needed to
learn for an exam at the beginning of the week. I was mentally drained coming
home around eight or nine each night on both days. I took the exam on Monday
morning, and as soon as I finished, I checked the backlog of tasks and lectures I
had left unfinished from my cardiology block, which began the week before, but
which I had left on the sidelines because of my focus on Pharmacology. Fourteen
lectures to review, one assignment, and a quiz. I had between Monday afternoon
and Wednesday morning to get all of my work done so that I could see my
family on Thursday for Thanksgiving without feeling the burden of school work
on my shoulders. I got started immediately. By the end of the night, I had
managed to complete 9 lectures and one assignment. I looked up at the clock:
3:00 AM. I went to bed, falling asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.
I woke up late on Tuesday with a headache, groggy and exhausted from the
night before. In hindsight, I wish that I had stopped studying earlier in the night.
Still, I was thankful for having finished so many lectures because over the next
two days I would be juggling other responsibilities. I jotted down the list of what
remained:
• Cardiology Physical Diagnosis Session
• Five Lectures
• Quiz
• LPP session
The next 24 hours were a blur, but I managed to finish my to-do list. I was finally
ready to enjoy a well-deserved Thanksgiving break with my family. My fiancée
and I packed our bags, and we took off, ready to put medicine on the back of our
minds for a day.
Unfortunately, my mind decided that medicine would stay front-and-center. It’s
funny how the mind works, or maybe just my own. Despite being home with
family with no work to do, my mind was still racing. At times, I would find
myself on my computer checking emails, unable to let go of the need to be
productive.
In medical school, I quickly began to realize how fleeting time is. Often, my
medical school friends will say, “I wish there was more time in the day. There’s
just too much to do.” We end up working around this unattainable dream by
becoming more efficient, squeezing out the things in our lives that prevent us
from succeeding at whatever it is we call success—maybe that means passing an
exam or feeling confident in clinic.
This Thanksgiving, I found that this constant frame-of-mind can carry over into
our personal lives, even when we don’t want it to. Finding balance between
professional and personal life, then, becomes an intentional and active process.
Without careful attention, we can easily fall back into the go-go-go mentality.
Luckily for me, I have a wonderful fiancée who helps me refocus on what
matters most in my life. “Look at your niece outside having fun in the backyard.
Why don’t you go play with her?” Martha encouraged me as I was sitting on my
computer finishing the hundredth course evaluation I received this semester.
The cold air is nice. It’s been a while since I have enjoyed being outside. As I look
around the playground where Audrey was on the slide, I see the familiar black,
gated fence that wraps around it, so my brother’s dog Charlie doesn’t run off
when he lets her outside. As Audrey walks away, Martha and I follow her and
open the gate that she is still too short to open herself. We walk to the red brick
pathway that winds down to the lake a hundred yards away, which is mostly
drained now that it’s late Fall. I notice the fresh green grass in the backyard that
my dad recently planted. Oak and pine trees, hundreds of feet high, tour over the
yard which my mother refuses to ever cut down because she enjoys the privacy it
offers from our neighbors and passersby on the lake. Standing on the brick
walkway, Audrey looks up to her right at Martha and holds out her hand.
Martha grabs on. Audrey then turns her head up and to the left, looking at me
with a giggly grin and outstretched hand. I hold her hand as the three of us walk
together down to the water without any real goal in mind, looking for our next
adventure.