What does it matter what I learnt here?

It’s my 6th year here and my brain has been permanently disfigured, forever transformed by all that Science. It’s my 6th year of student discounts. My 6th year of Tuna-pasta dinners. My 6th year of pretending that I know stuff, and my 6th year of exam-period all-nighters because I don’t.

It’ll also be my last year in post-kid-pre-man limbo, before I can finally show the world just how much I’ve learnt. LOADS, obviously – emotional growth and all that. My emotions are so big now. Along the way I’ve even learnt some medicine and, in a year, will be a doctor. But I’ve been wondering, what if I just ditched this science lark and did something else? Like banking, as seems to be the craze.

After just a few years of being a wolf in a sheepish-scientist’s clothing, should I cash in my degree for a fabled Graduate Career? Would all that science-y learning have been a waste? No chance – not when it’s left such a mark. All that thinking has been too tricky to leave my mind unscarred. Like I said, my brain has been permanently transformed by all the concepts I’ve had to curl it around.

Just when I feel like a genius, new lectures will add a new consideration, requiring a new kink in the ol’ cortex.

Heck, even the everyday tools I’ve learnt to use in medicine have blown my mind. Like a Cannula; a needle in a plastic tube, which you ease into a patient’s vein before, listen to this, you REMOVE THE NEEDLE AND LEAVE JUST THE PLASTIC TUBE INSIDE. Mind. Blown. I mean literally blown by a BREEZE OF AWESOME. And with ECGs, balloon catheters and stethoscopes as my toys, it just keeps on getting better.

I’ve felt spoilt. Spoilt to be using so casually these tools, which are probably thousands of years of human know-how distilled into practical instruments. I’ve often thought: “I couldn’t think this stuff up if I tried!” I can’t actually try now, though, because I already know. But I’m pretty sure I couldn’t.

What I could do, however, is apply these principles that I’ve learnt elsewhere. When the plumber comes round I could casually discuss the fluid dynamics of the house piping system, using my knowledge of cardiovascular physics. Then, having proved myself the Alpha-Male of Intellect, I’d also drop in details of the fluid dynamics OF MY URINE, which I spray round the house to mark my territory because I’m so alpha-male now! Raaaaaar! I put Extra ‘A’s in that word, because I’m so full of alpha.

But the feeling doesn’t last long. Just when I feel like a genius, on top of The Learning, new lectures will add a new consideration, requiring a new kink in the ol’ cortex. Tougher still is the more abstract stuff, the models and theories that try to describe the unseen workings of the body. Ones that try to reverse-engineer the filigree clockwork of human physiology, but are often left only able to observe and describe what we’re unable to explain.

Like a real scientists, as a student I’ve just been trying to fit all sorts of disparate principles and observations into a one-size-fits-all model that I can call maybe-possibly true. Good enough to work with for now. Sure, I’ve tried to understand the incestuous web of interactions of our chemical messengers, or extrapolate chemical results to predict invisible mechanics. But mainly, I’ve become familiar with the actual concepts, besting them with study until they can be used easily as tools of understanding. What was a barrage of nonsense and unsatisfying mess in 1st year is (sometimes) par-for-the-course by the 5th year, sheathed and ready to use.

I may not be able to discuss it casually over a Tetley with the plumber, but having once troublesomely navigated down these twists of logic, I can now zoom round them with ease, perhaps driving a new idea through and seeing how it comes out. It’s like the mental version of muscle-memory. I could approach businesses with revolutionary applications of the coagulation cascade to their management hierarchy, or use the practised clarity required in taking a patient’s history to write Oscar-winning dialogue. I could describe a friend’s need for a new relationship as like a cannula, a necessarily awkward time of pain and discomfort that will later be eased out leaving access once again to his veins. As in his heart. As in romance and all that.

Anyway, you get my point. The imprint of my learning will not just be in my recollection of specific details or facts, but in an appreciation of the subtleties of our reality, and the hard-earned tools of thought, swords of the psyche and… um, mallets of the mind that I’ve crafted to understand them.