Making my peace with medicine

Every once in a while, I feel the need to give the world an update on my life. For one thing, I know how hard it is for friends to stay in contact when they’re traveling all over the world to vastly different places, and although some people say that it’s disingenuous to just pick up with somebody as if you’ve been talking to them every day, I think it’s just fine, and even quite touching. (However, this is not the same as meeting somebody with whom you were never close friends, who then acts as if you were bosom buddies.)

Such genuine acts of friendship transport you back to an earlier time in your life. If you want to talk about time-traveling, you don’t have to watch Star Trek or Back to the Future, just send an e-mail or letter to a friend with whom you haven’t spoken for a few months or years. If the connection is rekindled, you will experience a powerful time-defying moment.

But anyway, all that really is just a preface to say, “it’s okay if my friends keep tabs on me in a medium such as a blog or facebook.” That anybody wants to keep up with me at all is a sweet gesture, and in the past week or two, friends from all about have come out of the woodwork (spurred on no doubt by summer’s approach) to ask me how I am doing and also to tell me about their own adventures. Those who want the juicy details can read on, and those who want even more can e-mail me anytime (dochuyen84@gmail.com).

Downward Spiral

Last year about this time, I was going through a horrible depression as I tried to reconcile my love for music with what I thought was a necessary pursuit of a medical degree; the culmination of this inner turmoil was a mental breakdown that kept me from graduating on time.

That summer, I tried to put the pieces of myself back together and decided to take things one step at a time, first by finishing up all the work and classes necessary for graduation (I graduated this past December), and then deciding on my next major step.

Choices

At the time, I wasn’t really sure I wanted to say no to medicine. My dad is a pharmacist; my mom is a medical technologist. I have pharmacist and doctor cousins out the wazoo. My family has always had a very strong background in healing, and with my Buddhist upbringing, a guiding principle of my life is that there is no greater good than compassion.

You just can’t beat the practice of medicine for compassion. Saving lives, treating the sick, alleviating the pain of the suffering masses…that’s all pretty compelling stuff. Looking at myself then, I still believed that music could be nothing more than a hobby—it just wasn’t as important.

Still, I couldn’t deny myself completely, and so I said, “well, I’ll ride out this music thing for a year or two, maybe get a Master’s degree, and then when it’s out of my system, I’ll come back.” I started to fill out my applications, and decided that UCLA and Indiana U. were the two prime places for the kind of thing I wanted to explore, ethnomusicology. But as I continued to work on applications, continued to practice and research music (as I did regularly anyway), I found that my perspective was not doing music itself justice. I was in essence saying that my musical interests were a phase I needed to get through, while in fact, I wasn’t feeling that at all. Instead, I felt that music was an integral part of the human experience, of my life experience, and if I found that just as valuable as the practice of medicine, then maybe it was.

Peace

Medicine isn’t about the preservation of life for its own sake. It’s about the preservation of life because life has some intrinsic value, because it is vibrant and beautiful. That’s why preservation alone is not the focus of medicine, but also the quality of life.

And what are the parameters of quality in life? The human bond? Culture? Art? It is all of these things, and the practice of medicine is in fact an empty shell if these aspects don’t exist. It’s so much harder to save the life of someone who wants to die or has nothing to live for…but if someone wants to live, truly live, now that is a beautiful thing.

Music is one such catalyst for purpose in human life, and it is so integrated into human culture that we forget that it has life-giving properties of its own. It is the salve that relieves a broken heart. It is the elixir that allows men to make merry. It is the cure for our social isolation.

I’ve made my peace with the practice of medicine. Those men and women are indeed as important as ever, but that concession does not diminish the importance of our cultural physicians, those men and women in the arts who make the otherwise mundane human story a powerful transcendent vision.

Thank you

On the less metaphysical side, I ended up being accepted to both UCLA (well, originally wait-listed) and IU. I picked Indiana, which I will be attending coming Fall ‘07 to work towards a Masters degree in Ethnomusicology (and an eventual PhD). In the meantime, my rocky medical road did boast some benefits, as I make some cash teaching the MCAT (Medical School Admissions Test) for Kaplan.

So, I guess all that is meant to say: I’m good now. Much love to all who have helped me find my way thus far. In many cases, your presence alone was enough to get me through the darkest times. Thank you all.

-Jason (Vu)

Friday, May 4th, 2007 : Personal : No Comments

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