“In your light I learn how to love.
In your beauty, how to make poems.
You dance inside my chest
where no-one sees you, but
sometimes I do, and
that sight becomes this art.”
― Rumi

Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Character building

What a week. What a messy irritating frustrating week!
Lab work can be so ruthless. It is so much easier to be a doctor. The human body is so forgiving to your mistakes. Not like the controlled pristine precise atmosphere of the scientific laboratory, where the way you breathe can mess things up.
Doing PCRs is not fun. In fact it is soul destroying work, especially if you are doing it for the second time in your entire life. You resist the temptation to scale things up. how do you know that the 0.61 microlitres has gone into the tube and mixed with the rest of the 9.39 microlitres of 'stuff'?!
On the wards, if someone is unwell and you need to give them some antibiotics, you can give an extra dose at times, 'for good measure'. no harm done, as long as you know where to draw the line. Not so in lab work. Lab work does not seem to accept the fact that it is also an imprecise science. A microenvironment does not necessarily scale down the variability. it is still performed by imperfect human beings with imperfect knowledge and imperfect skills. So why pretend?
In medicine, the more you work, the more you realize how little you know. I strongly believe that this feeling of inadequacy is proportional to one's insight. I cannot understand arrogant doctors. What are they arrogant about?
it is like the filament of a bulb being arrogant about the light in the room. You are just a plain conduit which is empty if not for what flows through it.
But I digress.
Character building - yes, I have come to hate that phrase. This is what people tell me when things go wrong, after 3 days of work, you find out that there is nothing to show for it, as it has all gone horribly wrong and yet, you don't know what you did wrong.
Character building, my foot!
Well, if it is character building, surely, it is the quality, not the quantity of character that you need.
I don't know
Going back to my samples now

2 comments:

murali said...

That is why I ignore reality and simulate all experiments

Anonymous said...

Reading ur notes, at least now i'm happy that somebody may be able to appreciate the frustration of an honest pathologist. The more ur frustation is, the more people expect precision from u. You have worded the truth well ; I shall be qouting it with ur permission from now. but why don't people accept that we r all practising an imprecise science. jeevithatheppole utharamillatha oru karyam thanne ithum!? And all world is a pretence afterall! feeling of inadequacy may not only necessarily be proportionate to your insight,arrogance is proportionate to ignorance moreover, as they always say.


But what is CHARACTER BUILDING?