Back

Years ago I worked in the woods every summer, next to a lake. The days were endless in North Idaho, and it was light from 4am until after 10.  The water, chilled in early June as though the ice just barely cleared, was 75 degrees by August as it rolled over our golden skin. At the end of the day, we’d clear the swimming area of kids, and send them to shower. Then we’d backflip off the lifeguard tower, or jump into the boat for a quick ski around the lake.

In those days there was so much to believe in. My legs were strong and there was God and night would always fall slowly like the way my Midwest relatives say goodbye. Most of all there were all of us, working 18 hour days together under the sun, to make people, kids, happy. There was this common goal, so there was community. I was never alone.

A world later, I found it again, in the place you’d least expect it, residency. In the hardest months of my life I found them. Earnest folks who know who I am and what I am capable of, and somehow still believe. In me, in medicine, in the joy that is working together.

It was hard, sure. The work took everything I had and more. And I’ve said before the toll it took on my family nearly broke us. But in those days, there was so much to believe in, even when I didn’t believe in myself.

Where I live now it’s different. There’s less cohesion, less inspiration. Belief in anything is optional.

I’d been gone a year. I feared I’d been forgotten, that I’d forgotten everything I learned.

And then I went back to the place where I became the doctor I am today. I visited all the familiar haunts: the hospital, the sacred sign-out place that is the Falcon’s office, the call room, the clinic.

I must have looked weary to the Dragon when I met him for lunch. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m just tired,” I said, and ordered a pizza. Later I mumbled that I might be less than excited about my job.

“Tell me a story about a patient,” he said. An attempt, I think, to inspire me, remind me of what I do love.

I told him about Potter.

Which of course is the worst patient story from the last 8 months, but it was the only one I could think of.

It’s unfair to blame this dysthymia on external forces. There’s something I need to learn here, some way I need to grow.  But I miss these people, like I miss the Idaho summers of my youth. Not for the work itself, but that it was made bearable by a community. These people give me something to believe in.

It’s a crutch. I need to believe in things myself. I need to inspire, not just to be inspired. Maybe I need to be without my people right now so I have something to offer when I move back and establish the commune.

See, I want to work with these people again, share practices and overseas projects with them. We should all buy a piece of land with yurts around the periphery, a garden ringed with daisies, and Shaman will create a series of baths. The Visionary will inspire me and Haiyan will stretch open my mind to the world, and my kids will be raised by a village. We’ll call it Yurt Village. We’ll have matching tattoos.

It’s sort of a joke. Except I mean it. It would be neat.

A half hour later I somehow found myself in Vasectomy clinic, a syringe and a Li clamp in my gloved hands. Ceci, a year behind me in training, invited me to do her surgeries for her; she doesn’t want to learn them. My clinic needs me to. She handed us instruments. The Dragon stood across from me.

I operated successfully on two men. It had been a year, but I remembered the techniques, and learned the updates. Plus, I was a visitor, but I was home.

And something had changed. I don’t think Ceci saw it, I don’t even think the Dragon noticed. But I was no longer a resident, across from my mentor. I was an attending. I was thinking each step out for myself. I didn’t wait for the instrument to be selected for me, I asked for it or took it off the table. When there was bleeding I moved to control it.

It was an unexpected boost to my faltering ego. I got to see, for a moment, how far I’ve come.

Huh. And most of that came out of being mostly alone.

And then I went to the woods, which was the real reason I was in town. The Visionary was getting married, after all, next to a lake. We swam and canoed, and slept late under the trees.