Before medical school, the idea of becoming a doctor was nothing but a faraway dream. A dream based on those early experiences of my childhood, my memories of our general practitioner, a family doctor, of the operation and rehabilitation for my club foot, of my appendectomy. Those brief but intense moments that found their way into my chronological life and somehow carved themselves deeper than others. That carving formed a draft image of what a doctor was. My memory of feeling safe among the fear, of great abilities, but mainly of kindness. Those memories were of the doctor I wanted to be.
The consultant
At your medical school interview, among the many topics you might be encouraged to speak about, there is only one question you know will definitely be asked, only one question you can actually prepare for:
Tell me, why do you want to become a doctor?
We all say ‘I want to become a doctor because I like people’, but what we’re really saying is that we like stories. Stories bind us together, stories unite us, and we tell our stories in the hope that someone out there will listen, and we will be understood.
Months later, those of us fortunate enough to be offered a place from that interview were thrown together on a grey September morning at the very beginning of medical school. We didn’t realise that the experiences we were destined to share would bind us all for a lifetime, that walking together through the next five years would grow friendships, relationships – even marriages and children – because at that moment we were still strangers, held in the darkness of a lecture theatre, by a magical and breathless excitement.
It was our inaugural lecture. A learned and dazzlingly qualified professor stood on the stage before us, and he leaned on the podium and gazed out at his audience, in a learned and dazzlingly qualified silence, and we waited. All three hundred of us. When he finally spoke, he dug into the bones of how each of us felt. How we had felt in all the weeks beforehand, buying books from a list four pages long and staring endlessly at the timetable of our future selves. Being paraded in front of friends and relatives. Imagining. Daring to believe, but dismissing those beliefs as foolishness. We had all felt it that morning, as we walked or cycled, or drove to our new beginning. For every seat in that lecture theatre, there had been four other people who had wanted to sit there. Surely this meant we were capable? Surely this meant we were finally allowed to turn to long-held dreams and taste the possibility? Yet still we felt foolish, because it all seemed so ridiculous. So unlikely. But with his words on that grey September morning, a wise professor managed to find the very pinpoint of how each of us was feeling, and in that moment it all became less foolish. Less unlikely. In that moment, it all became real.
‘Welcome,’ he said, ‘to the first day of your medical career.’
We were a mixed bunch of three hundred in that lecture theatre. There were some who came from family trees littered with doctors, some who were the first to see the inside of a university. There were those who had travelled only a few miles to be there, and those who had travelled halfway around the world. Some were fresh from A-levels or a gap year spent wandering the planet, while others – like me – had found medicine later in life, in their thirties or even in their forties, having arrived from a succession of seemingly unrelated jobs that would – in time – prove strangely useful. But it was a love of stories that made our common ground, and we would spend the rest of our lives listening to them. Stories told in the handkerchief quiet of palliative care, stories told in the rush of an outpatient clinic. Stories whispered under the crash and chaos of an emergency department. Funny stories. Sad stories. Stories woven with lies that needed to be unpicked. Stories that made us laugh, or despair or worry. Stories that made us smile on the drive home, and stories so profoundly moving, we would carry them with us for the rest of our lives.
I am very often asked about the similarities between being a doctor and being an author, and the answer is very simple. Writing always rests on a narrative, on hearing a voice, and it’s exactly the same for medicine – because medicine is all about people, and people are made out of stories.