From both sides now.

Days offffff! For some reason–no idea how or why–I have no class for five days in a row. And we haven’t had anything but Intro to Clinical Medicine (teaches many important skills like physical exam, different diagnostics, etc, but not much to study for this week once you understand what Evidence Based Medicine is…check) since the last Block Exam, so I am free as a bird! Guess how many people are sitting in my favorite coffee shop at 1 pm on Thursday? One. Her name is Jessica. And she is reading a novel that is not about medicine.

As I sit here, reveling in my free time with a novel and a big, sturdy, cream-colored mug of coffee, I feel, as I sometimes do, a little two-sided: I was the one who, in college, majored in both Physics and English. Every single person I’ve ever met responds to this information with, “Hm. That’s an odd combination.” I just laugh. I never thought of it as a combination, because they were just the two things that I liked the best. And despite what the way I spend my time now reflects, I still love both of those things. Science, because of the answers it provides and the sense that it makes. Certain sciences are better than others for that reason: physics, for instance, tells us all the glorious reasons that the universe turns the way that it does. I’m also really taken with Microbiology right now, and if I weren’t so set on surgery I might consider a future in Infectious Disease, because how great is it that we can find, right down to the molecule, exactly what it causing your symptoms? It’s a puzzle! A puzzle with one correct answer! A puzzle with clues and correct paths to go down, with twists and turns and sometimes surprising endings. And who doesn’t love a good, solveable puzzle, amiright?

But I love art, too, particularly art made with words. The only thing more brilliant than an incredible physician is an incredible physician who can really, really write (holler, William Carlos Williams). More than just with proper grammar and correct formatting. Good writing is the beautiful, expressive language, yes, but also words and pictures and storylines that can tease out the bigger puzzles of society, of life, or the current age, or humanity. Man, do I love a good book.

I love medicine. It is beautiful and fascinating and I have never once questioned that it is what I want to do with my life. But I miss being an English major, spending my days reading and writing and thinking about what words really say. I think it’s that thinking that I really crave. Don DeLillo (read on) says he became a writer to learn how to think, as writing is a concentrated form of thought, and there’s something to be said for time spent viewing such a thing. So I try, as best I can, to continue to read, even when I don’t have afternoons like this one to really delve into a good novel.

A couple weeks ago I finished Dave Eggers’ The Circle,  a super readable, shockingly engaging digital utopian novel: think a year from now, when (a company like) Google buys all social media outlets and combines them to make one perfect, virtual universe. If you’ve ever hated Facebook for a second, read this book. So good. Easily my favorite Eggers so far. Wanting to remain in that critical, satirical, challenging world a little longer, the next book I chose was Fiona Maazel’s Woke Up Lonely, the story of a cult that promises to end loneliness in the 21st century. I love a book that will stare down such a huge, seemingly inevitable, unavoidably significant concept. And Fiona has the humor of Don DeLillo—“the chief shaman of the paranoid school of American fiction”—and who can resist that? (If you haven’t read White Noise, you should). Hemingway, Pynchon, Hunter S. Thompson…the amount of excellent words floating around out there, just waiting for a reader, is incomprehensible. Seems silly to ignore them just because I’m in med school.

I don’t know that reading makes you a better doctor, but I imagine that it probably does. I do think that it makes you a better human—one that thinks and challenges their ideals to an extent that brings real belief, one that seeks meaning, one that believes in learning—and surely better humans make better doctors. That’s a thing, right?