Fourth Year Vignette

I remain busy with school, now spending more time in clinic than in the classroom. Clinic work is amazing: there’s so much that natural medicine can do, and it’s wonderful to see patients in recovery from medical issues that have dogged them for years. We aim for correction of maladapted physiology, so that symptoms don’t disappear temporarily just to reappear later, often more strongly than before. I am fortunate to be on a mentor shift this year with a doctor who requires that we write a case analysis weekly. In the best tradition of naturopathy, this requires that we reflect carefully on the patient’s history and presenting issues, why these issues have arisen and how we can best address not just the symptoms but the cause. This is not an easy task because chronic health issues often result from developmental trauma or insidious environmental insult, and more often than not have a mental/emotional component long submerged beyond conscious awareness. The irony is that it’s usually the patient, not the doctor, that ultimately discovers the cause, and the process sometimes takes months or years. But it’s by making the effort to know the tale, by patient and doctor being open to it, that we allow the unfolding to occur. And in every case the story reveals a wonder of Nature: how it wants more than anything to support life, and the lengths it’s willing to go to to do so. Even more marvelous, Nature itself provides us the means to rebalance ourselves. There is healing in food, in plants, in minerals, in water. Our sustenance is at our doorstep, if we are wise enough to see it and farsighted enough to preserve it. And there is healing within our walls as well, in the love we manifest in care of one another.

Midway

I suppose the lesson of my second year in med school was that there is blessing in frustration. What frustrations there were: so many tests in school that there was little time to learn, feeling so small in view of how much there is to know, too little time to fully and committedly connect with the community, fighting to scrape together a few moments to nourish myself, half the summer break sacrificed to prepare for Science Board Exams. Meanwhile, my house became somewhat like the cast of characters in “Beauty and the Beast”: just when I was having the most trouble keeping up, the parts of the house winked at each other and decided who was going to misbehave next, just to keep things interesting!

When they interviewed me for med school, one of the questions was “How do you cope with stress?” I knew even then that it was easier to answer the question than to actually address it constructively when the need arises. At the time I had a strong repertoire of well-implemented strategies: a regular yoga practice, connecting with a friend when times got rough, asking for help from a supportive community, time out to breathe. In the move to Portland and with the start of the program, each of those strategies took near-mortal blows. Uprooting oneself from community and loved ones is a hard thing indeed. Don’t get me wrong: I love the program and can’t picture any other direction for my professional life. But the day-to-day particulars of surviving this adventure are enough to make one question one’s sanity on a near-daily basis!

When confronted with too much stress and too little time, I found my best strategy was to look for the hidden blessing. Sometimes it’s a challenge, but it never fails to put me back on the right track. School can drive me crackers, but what an opportunity to listen to great healers. No one ever knows it all, but how wonderful to learn this incredible medicine every day. Entering third year, I got to wholeheartedly serve the community through my clinical work. And after much delay, both the yoga practice and regular folkdancing are restarting. How wonderful that my body is still willing to do those things, and how wonderful to have a husband to folkdance with!

So it’s onward and upward, which no doubt will bring new and different frustrations…and opportunities to enjoy our blessings!

The Start of the Journey

They say that three of life’s top stressors are divorce, moving and changing careers. In 2004, having just finished the first two, I embarked on the third. Crazy, no? But what joy there is in setting one’s course uphill, in the direction of dreams.

That year, my older child graduated college and became self-supporting while the younger left home to start undergraduate school. In anticipation of my empty nest, I did some profound thinking about what I wanted the next stage of my professional life to look like. My Accounting career had fulfilled its purpose of financing my children’s undergraduate education and while I was not unhappy, I decided that I would prefer to spend my working life making a direct difference in the lives of individuals. Allowing myself to ask the question “What would I do if I knew I could not fail?”, I realized almost immediately that I would return to my original undergraduate field of study: medicine. After 18 months of preparatory courses - all while continuing to work full-time - I was accepted to the National College of Naturopathic Medicine in Portland, Oregon.

A huge lesson I learned along this path is that if you take courage to state your dream aloud, the universe will support the dream with resources you never imagined. I am grateful daily for friends who all along saw me as I wished to see myself, offering encouragement when my determination flagged. I am still amazed that once I stated my decision to purchase a home in Portland, a city I knew nothing about at the time, I found my home within three hours. And it’s a cute one in a village-y section of the city, with a real neighborhood feel. It seems the universe indeed liked this dream.

And then the thing happened that I never would have anticipated, even in that year of blessings. In May 2004 a wonderful man entered my life. Don’t ask how I found time for that relationship during the last month of my school semester, with a huge project at work in its final stages, and while buying the house in Portland and selling the one in L.A. I’m not sure myself how I did that. Further, realizing my professional dream meant a year of long distance relationship - tricky when you're also in your first year of med school! The best things in life are never free. But he stayed the course, relocating to Oregon after we married in summer of 2005, and has been a source of support all along the way.

So in the end, perhaps the universe had the last laugh: it looks like my dream was bigger than I thought. The road to a dream is a challenging road: at every turn obstacles crop up and ask “how much do you want to do this?” There are times when my heart was in my throat as I answered "yes". I didn’t know that to embrace life, one must embrace fear. We’ve all become such experts at denying fear. It’s a damaging game, though: fear will not be stopped and if not acknowledged, manifests as tension, chronic illness, isolation. But fear acknowledged and faced results in growth. And every one of us is meant to grow - to the end of our days.