Novice

It astonishes me how many times I keep repeating the novice/expert cycle.

I seriously haven't settled into a routine for more than a couple of years straight in my entire life....and just as I get good, inevitably it is time to switch to something where I'm back at square one.

College - med school- grad school - med school - intern - research - now this.... Having completed an internship and a year as a research resident, I am technically a third-year resident, though I'm widely recognized as a first-year resident in radiology.

Geoff reminded me that when he was a third year resident, he was in his last year of pediatrics. But, here I am, a spring chicken. I guess, at the very least, it should make me a very adaptive person (?). Luckily, I'm less daunted by all of this than I feel I should be...an audacity that I probably should have outgrown by now.

On Friday, there was a new 4th-year med student looking on as I read out with my attending. Apparently, she knows my attending on a personal level (a fact made apparent by all of the personal references and inside jokes she painstakingly made at every opportunity). Every time my attending asked me a question, she would rush to answer it and show me up. The kid even pimped me once. (She is campaigning hard for a rads residency).

As mildly annoying as she was, I was impressed by the volume of factoids she was able to regurgitate, how she spewed those old hackneyed medical mantras that may or may not be located somewhere deep in my memory. There is an art to medicine, but the side that is not art is largely the brute memorization of "facts" that are repeated as ardently and devoutly as any fundamentalist would recite lines from their holy book.

This is the essence of what separates medicine from science. Medicine is about mastering the known (or, at the very least, what everyone agrees upon as being known). It is concrete, causal, black-and-white, and self-assured. Hard work and smarts are generally rewarded.

Science, on the other hand, lingers on the fringe, with the unknown. Or more unsettling still (to the MDs, that is), it deals in uprooting even the most deeply-held facts and mantras. To live in the scientific world, you have to tolerate theory, complexity, shades of gray, and uncertainty. Hard work and intelligence are necessary, but not sufficient to succeed in science. You also need a healthy measure of luck.

With some luck, I'll be successful at navigating these two antithetical yet co-dependent worlds - at least successful enough to justify all of these years of training.