Do Better

46 pages from the end of my current book, and today is my last day of calculus! I think something must be wrong with me because in between studying, and leisure reading, and making coffee, and crossfit (that's me down there), my brain somehow decided to look up 1-year master's programs. I'll have a year between undergrad and med school (at least), so maybe I could fit a master's in there. Who knows.

Reading Better has made me think very critically about a lot of issues that doctors face, which I hadn't fully extrapolated before. Malpractice and insurance battles. How to close the care gap between hospitals, and better statistically monitor programs and procedural successes. One of the classes I took last quarter at Davis was GDB 102: Disease Policy and Intervention. As a capstone course for my major (Global Disease Biology), this class involved an "exit interview"/friendly interrogation with our major professor, with material from any of our major courses as fair game for questioning. One question in particular that stuck with me from this class, this interview, and from my research proposal, is "How do you define success?". More specifically, my question was, "How would you have defined success for both the WHO and MSF during the 2014 Ebola outbreak?" This is the kind of thing that keeps me awake at night. Look at the Millennium Development Goals from the WHO. Overarching world health goals like "eradicate extreme poverty and hunger", and "to reduce child mortality". WHAT DOES THIS EVEN MEAN?! Think about the logistics of reducing hunger: planning, funding, training and deployment of personnel, developing a program that is culturally sensitive and self-sustaining... I mean, the list of logistics goes on forever, and the devil is in the details, but I love and respect the level of planning that must go into these things. But in the end, really, how do you define success for something like this? Small, measurable goals? A program whose success can be sustained without outside intervention?

What it comes down to, as I think the point of the novel Better is, is how do we as individuals dedicate ourselves to the relentless determination required to solve these colossal problems? It is not so simple, and yet it is. Be diligent in the work that you do, and do not become complacent. Do not accept failure. But know when to accept that you yourself have nothing more to offer. This is not to accept defeat, but to know your limits, to know what is realistically achievable in the time given, to know the limits of the human body, to know the limits of medicine. And yet... what is realistic? What is time? What is medicine?

“All things are possible until they are proved impossible and even the impossible may only be so, as of now.”

This is what drives me every day. 

It got me through 3 marathons, multiple half marathons, it got me to return to school while working multiple miserable jobs full-time, and it is what convinces me that we can each do better, in every aspect of our lives.

Perhaps your dreams are daunting, perhaps the world is filled with disease and pain, but maybe it's your broken hands that can sustain the life of another. Maybe it is your compassion that will change things. Maybe you need to give yourself the chance to see if it is possible. But maybe this is only possible if you commit to doing better, in every aspect of your life. 

Speaking of better, I feel like this post could be better... but alas, one thing at a time! Ha!