In high school, I spent summers freely on the beaches of the Jersey Shore. I rarely experienced any significant level of stress, as my only responsibilities included selling boards at the local surf shop and training for the upcoming field hockey season. Waves of anxiety would rise and fall as I spent weekends here or there at field hockey camps, hoping to get recruited by Division 1 programs. I spent most of my days by the water, surrounded by friends, laughing at whomever the sea decided to make a fool of that day. We were perfectly content to deploy the words “work-life balance” in our attempts to negotiate with our bosses for late-starts at work on mornings where the tides rolled in favor of perfect surfing conditions.
As a collegiate athlete, I started early and harshly on the endline. We completed run tests and difficult training sessions at dawn to beat the oppressive summer sun. We sought refuge from the hottest hours of the day in a state-of-the-art, air-conditioned facility before returning to the field in the evenings. They sent us to physical therapy between film sessions to mitigate persistent soreness, which seemed tyrannical throughout two-a-day season. As fall rolled in, we squeezed in a morning lift or scrimmage session before class, occasionally showing up battered and bruised after falling victim to a misplaced shot during practice. Stress levels were consistently high and frequently spiked after a poor athletic performance or injury. Win or lose, we crammed for midterms while fighting motion sickness on bus rides home from away games. Despite all the stress, we were perfectly content to save work-life balance for the off-season, in favor of chasing championships.
The summer of my first year of medical school, I commissioned as an officer in the United States Navy. I chose to attend the Uniformed Services University, America’s Medical School, and traded my game-day uniform for fatigues. I was completely lost in a new world with new rules, new teammates and old traditions. My classmates and I spent the summer days and nights with our noses in books or otherwise turned up at the pungent perfume of cadaver lab. Many of us planned mid-day workouts to shake out our saturated minds, which were inundated with mnemonics, pathways and anatomical “triangles” of all shapes and sizes, before returning to our studies at night. While keeping up with a rigorous academic curriculum, we also drilled on everything from trauma combat casualty care to tactical troop movements in an operational setting. We were perfectly content to learn from one another and lean on one another, united by a common mission to serve our brothers and sisters in arms.
As I reflect on the summer of my final year of medical school, it seems hazier than the summers I spent by the water years ago. Mornings started in the darkest hours of night, as our team rounded on patients just a few hours after I had set my alarm the night before. I was comforted by the familiar camaraderie of a team embracing the suck together. Dressed in quiet anxiety in the operating room, I coolly stated indications for an awake craniotomy with motor mapping as my mind raced to anticipate the attending’s next question. Hours later, coffee in hand, I laughed with the other sub-I’s about our summer of struggle. Soon enough, I was walking home again under the cover of summer’s stars, perpetually caught between feeling entirely fulfilled, yet still hungry. On post-call days, I was perfectly content to lace up my sneakers and run deliriously through new cities to maintain some semblance of normalcy. While work and life may not have been meticulously balanced, it was one of the most exhilarating summers that I can remember.
With many summers and unknowns ahead of me, it is hard to believe that I am about to find out where I will be “vacationing” for the next seven years. Will the summers there be hot and dry, or humid and heavy? I recognize that, if I’m lucky, I soon will be consumed by the rigors of a neurosurgical residency. There will be many nights where excitement won’t outcompete exhaustion. Many hobbies will be thrown overboard, weddings and funerals will be missed and the show will generally go on. We all move through life silently adapting to our ever-accumulating responsibilities, and adjusting an inevitably imperfect work-life “balance” in the process. Standing juxtaposed between boundless enthusiasm and sobering responsibility, I reflect on ghosts of summers past and extract two commonalities between them all: Choosing to make the most out of the least of life’s moments can leave us perfectly content, and we can get by with a little help from our friends.
