I.I.I – Awakening
I.I.I
AWAKENING
It was just like any other day. I had just come back from school when – CUT! Oof, bored already. Jeez! Right from the very first sentence. I apologise. Let’s start over and just cut right down to it, shall we? In the weirdest way possible. Here it goes. Ready? Okay! I’m a massive Grey’s Anatomy fanatic. To me it’s not just a show.
I won’t even dare to tell you how many times I’ve watched it start to finish. People get the same incredulous look on their faces only when I tell them how many gallons of coffee I gulp down on a daily basis. Aah coffee; the love of my life, the drink of the gods, the essence of my being… Isn’t it just the best damn thing in the entire world? And the aroma… My god the aroma! Some say the best smell in the world is new baby smell. Clearly, they never gave birth to Colombian coffee.
Am I rambling? I think I’m rambling. How am I already on a tangent? But don’t you worry, you’ll get used to sifting through the gibberish to get to what’s really important soon enough, trust me. Hmm trust. Rhymes with crust. Mmm… Cheesy crust. Great, now I’m craving a giant pizza. Ahh what I wouldn’t give for a pizza quattro stagioni right now… Especially the way they make it at that one place. Dripping with oil and full of peas. Peas. Pees. Pee. Man, I haven’t peed in ages. I really need to pee now. You see? That’s how my mind works. And whether that’s the result of millions of random, unrelated neurons firing together, or perhaps a neurological disorder which still remains undiagnosed to this day, I have no idea as to what makes me think this way. I’ll be right back. Really gotta pee!
So, where was I? Right. As you would expect any self-respecting story to begin, mine starts off with me binge-watching TV. I’m on the second season of Grey’s Anatomy when suddenly it stopped being just a medical drama I’d watch on-and-off since I had been a kid. I remember thinking how cool this one case was. A woman presenting to the emergency department after having what seemed to be a heart attack. Of course, nothing’s ever quite as straightforward as that on a TV show.
We get to know that this has happened to her before. More than once. And it always happens on the same exact day of the year – the day her neighbour slash ex-lover died. Grief so pure, so unbearable, so tragic… That it actually stops her heart from beating. Just like that. How friggin cool, right? So of course, I had to look it up because it’s nothing short of magic to anyone who knows next to nothing about medicine. And apparently this is a phenomenon called Takotsubo cardiomyopathy. Or, in layman’s terms… Broken heart syndrome.
Severe and repeated emotional and physical stress can cause the heart muscle to change in shape over time, with the left ventricle eventually forming the shape of a Japanese octopus (tako) trap (tsubo). Yes people, your heart can actually, literally and figuratively break – because of love. Turns out Billy Ray Cyrus and his achy breaky heart might be in need of a cardiologist after all, not just a therapist.
I didn’t resume the episode or move on to the next. I stood there, still. Certain of only one thing. “This is all I want to do with my life from now on. I want more of this. How the hell can I do something other than this?”. Just like that, medicine became the reason I lived. A thirst for knowledge unlike any other I had ever experienced before. It wasn’t something I felt inclined to try or something I just had to get out of my system. It became my one and only goal in life.
I could finally understand Cristina Yang – my one and only hero! I’m gonna go right ahead and assume you know who she is. But, just in case you had a sudden onset episode of acute amnesia and you don’t know who she is…
Cristina Yang’s this badass surgeon on Grey’s. She is the only Asian doctor on the show (or at least she used to be), she is strong, she is passionate, she doesn’t need anyone’s approval and she is an independent woman who don’t need no man (nor baby). And yes, I know she’s just a TV character. She’s fictional. She’s not real. Well, be that as it may, to me, she is the closest thing I have to a role model.
My point, because yes, I do have one, is that it only took that one moment for me to overhaul my entire life completely. Up until then I was studying something to get some random job and do something some people expected of me. I was stuck, asleep, as if trapped in an unending coma. And at that point, for the first time in my life, it felt like I was awake, like I was finally taking control of my own life. Funny thing is, it wasn’t really my decision. It was just something I had to do. Kinda like a deus ex machina I didn’t even know I needed. It was then, at the age of seventeen, that I knew. I knew all I’d want to do for the rest of my life would be medicine.