Before my last spate of posts about my publishing journey (on the submission, the award, and the call), it had been over four years since I updated this site. Last I left off, it was the fall of 2020, and I had decided to leave medical school.
A lot has changed since then, so I thought it was high time to catch you all up, bring some continuity to this site, and fill in the plot holes. Anyone who knows me or has read this site before will be unsurprised I’m doing it through songs.
Here we go.
In the Disbelief, I Couldn’t Face Reinvention
In December of 2020, after I went on a Leave of Absence from med school, Taylor Swift had released evermore (the superior sister in terms of songwriting, argue with a wall). This one lyric from the song “happiness” haunted me, and I adapted it for the title of this section, because it embodied everything I was feeling back then.
Lyric video for the saddest song called “happiness”
Leaving medical wasn’t a fun choice. A lot of times, it didn’t feel like a choice at all, but of course it was. It came with a lot of grief and rage, and at a time full of so much uncertainty. I went on a Leave of Absence, but in some ways, I never fully left.
It was a dark time. I couldn’t move on from the med school dream even though I’d left. It made no sense, because so many things that’d been problems in med school shouldn’t have been. It had to be fixable. It could be fixable if anyone would just listen. These thoughts circled round and round and round.
In the meantime, I digitized my notebooks of old writing and finished by the end of the year, but a lot of my energy still went toward med school related things and people.
The New Year came and went, the digitizing project was over, and I was still wallowing. I just couldn’t see a way forward.
I Came Back Stronger Than a ’90s Trend
From the song “willow,” also from evermore
In late January, I got word that my med school had hired a new dean, and she was interested in rectifying a lot of the barriers for me and other students, so, after some consideration, I went back to medical school.
It didn’t all happen right away. There was a lot to sort through. Some things got sorted and some didn’t. One of my first blocks was a couple of virtual classes. After that I’d start clinical rotations.
I had so much dread about all the disability-related admin I’d have to do for clinical rotations, all the likely prejudice I’d be faced with, and I wasn’t handling it great. I’m not kidding when I say this: when I wasn’t attending my virtual classes, I couldn’t get off the couch. All I did was read fanfic and order DoorDash. I’d never read fanfic before in my life, and suddenly I was reading about 37 hours of AO3 a day.
(I did and have only ever read one ship, and those who know me well or have ever looked at my Twitter in the last several years will know what ship that is.)
Then rotations were here, and as with most things, the reality both did and didn’t live up to the dread I felt. A lot of parts of rotations, some rotations specifically, were amazing. Looking back, I sometimes think that medical school was both the most awesome and the most awful thing I ever did, and this was even truer for rotations. There were ways that clinical rotations were so unquestionably better than anything in the classroom phase.
I learned that I could handle bleak cases better than I expected. I learned I had a superpower for patients opening up to me. (On my Family Med rotation, they used to jokingly refer to my shifts as Chrys’s Psych Clinic.) I learned that even though surgery was not ever going to be a possibility for me as a specialty, I really, really, really liked the OR. I learned that I actually did know what to do, both emotionally and practically, when a patient on one of my rotations disclosed abuse to me when I was alone in the room with them, and for that I credit my many years working with kids at various camps. I learned that I could handle myself when a patient started to undress for no reason after telling me all about his sex dreams (and funny how none of that came up when I came back in with a male attending). I learned how to pap smears and write chart notes and
I learned that any of the prejudice, discrimination, and exclusion I experienced never came from patients. Even if some were a little skeptical or put off at first. The good thing about being a med student is that sometimes you’re the most steady presence, as attendings and residents shift on and off the unit, and so even the one person I can think of who acted a bit strange toward me in a way I could tell was related to my albinism had changed their tune by the third day I was there.
It Was Time to Go and As She Was Leaving It Felt Like Breathing
Lyric Video for “it’s time to go,” yet another from evermore
However, everything that made me want to leave medical school the first time around, came back stronger and with more of a vengeance than I did. It was building for a long time, probably since before I returned, but it all came to a head over one Thanksgiving weekend. I realized, finally, that I didn’t want this to be my life. The next Monday, which was dark and drenched with rain, I left my clinic shift early (a long story for another time) and knew I was never going back.
This time, it was true, it was final, and it was right. It took some sorting out, but I had no misgivings this time.
It Was a Long Time Coming
Eventually, in life after medicine, I had to choose another path. The one I chose was one I’d looked at when I was a med student, when I was on my first Leave of Absence but not ready to leave, and then again long after all the leaving was finalized: the graduate program in Book Publishing at Portland State.
There will be lots more to say about this–lie a lot a lot–but for now I’ll say that I’m coming up on the end of my second year (out of three) and there are parts about grad school that are hard, harder than med school even, but access has so far not been one of them. For that, I’m so grateful I could cry anytime I think about it. Even though some of the ways I’ve needed access were actually harder to implement than what I needed in med school, I’ve encountered nothing but willingness and inclusion.
In many ways, this feels like where I was always meant to end up.
The Professor Said to Write What You Know
Lookin’ Backwards Might Be the Only Way to Move Forward
And then, of course, there is also my manuscript that recently got selected as a Wandering Aengus Press Book Award winner and will be published next spring.
I listened to this song as I submitted my manuscript, and the line I quoted above made me cry. You all might not know this about me, but I’m a total sap, especially when it comes to writing and songs and how they intersect. As my manuscript was a collection of personal stories and reflections in the form of lyric essays, the looking backwards part resonated so much.
Writing and revising this manuscript overlapped with my time after med school but before the book publishing program, as I was applying, and while I was in the program. Two of the essays address med school pretty directly.
There is a circularity to it all, the way these pieces of my life have woven together. A messiness. And it feels just right.
I say now. My spring term just started and it’s bound to be one that’s busy to the breaking point, but that is the nature of grad school, and so it goes.
For now, though, I’m going to go watch the “Sucker Punch” episode of Castle, which might be one of the most perfect episodes of TV, which then ends with a Pearl Jam song which makes it even more of a chef’s kiss. But no, the ship I referred to above wasn’t Caskett.
Chrys
Chrys Buckley 