the doctor is in

Almost all of us when we were kids might have fancied becoming a doctor. Clad in antiseptic white medical gown, the most recurrent childhood image would be one with a hanging stethoscope by the neck. I always had this caricature in mind being a kid who once ambitioned to become a life-saving hero. Such aspiration wasn’t sustained though unlike those who really went on to labor through pre-med to med school. But truth is, surgery is where the real action is. A doctor could get some serious ass-kicking saving lives when he's best a surgeon with the OR as his playing field.

This surgical action is what really makes me stick through every Grey’s Anatomy episode. The melodrama is a bit soap-ish but then it humanizes the mechanical and artificial feel of the Seattle Grace Hospital. In the operating room, you feel the tension and the knife-sharp precision of every procedure. You think you’re watching real doctors, but in fact they’re really characters who one minute away from the OR are irritably twitchy, sex-starved, egotistic, attention-grabbing bitches and assholes.

They get weird sometimes and totally unpredictable. As weird and unpredictable from the cases they handle – male ‘pregnancy’, spontaneous orgasms, a ticking bomb inside a thoracic cavity. Their candid exchanges sometimes feel perfunctory and unflinching as their initial diagnoses. But they feel – sometimes putting enough emotional baggage in a patient – and sometimes they cry over the death of someone whose life they were heroically saving a minute ago.

I just finished the two-season marathon of the series. (The local channel showing it has 3 episodes left before the explosive finale.) After 30 or so episodes, I realized it was not the amount of blood shed or flesh cut, that would have prevented me from being a surgeon or a doctor for that matter, but the feeling after one declares the time of death. That sudden plunge into silence and grief. Having faced death, it's an emotional pit I don’t think I could ever get out of. It’s a difficult feeling knowing that you could not save lives at all times.