At age 12, with a stack of 8-by-10 printer paper pilfered from my father’s office and a flickering bedside lamp, I created my first comic book: "Greg’s Journey." Greg was a poppy seed, swallowed by the ruthless human Nancy, and thrust into a grueling odyssey through her digestive tract, complete with a molten lake of acid and assassins with enzymatic swords. He tragically fell in love with Ms. Aqua, who was brutally absorbed into the alternate realm of the large intestine. I was a madly imaginative child, scribbling on any available surface, writing haikus instead of homework, and once co-authoring a "Friends"-esque screenplay starring characters named Zandler and Raquel. As a child, I didn’t need permission to be “silly.”
On my old MacBook, there was a folder of old writings, lost and buried under the subfolder labeled “Parents’ state tax 2015.” It contained stories and poems I’d written starting at age 10, most of them mortifyingly emo, full of teenage angst. Then at 24, it all stopped. That aspect of my personality has been dormant ever since I discovered my love of medicine and later of the OR. Being the goal-oriented type medicine attracts, I deemed creative writing frivolous, inefficient, and unfocused. My image of a surgeon at the time, along with existing role models, would not deign to doodle or write silly stories. Greg and his kind of creative outlet were shoved in a closet and long forgotten.
As a medical student, my understanding of the typical surgeon wasn’t far from the one held by the general population: one that is unflappable, stoic, and with a singular focus. The first surgeon I ever worked with was a 6-foot-tall man of German descent, brusque yet candid, who advised me, “You’d make a great surgeon one day, but do not even consider it if you can imagine doing anything else with your life.” He rarely spoke of a life outside the OR, a place to which he’d dedicated his every waking moment. When he retired, his patients spoke of his nearly heroic dedication to his practice, and his colleagues deemed him a true stalwart to the field of surgery. I was awestruck and inspired to lead a similar life of grand ambition and even grander accomplishments.
Somewhere along my training, I realized that surgeons were subjected to a heavy dose of, to put it positively, superhumanization, to put it negatively, god-complex. Both sides of the coin ascribe to them physical, mental, and moral capacities beyond what is expected of typical humans. To hold a career as such, it’s often expected that it would be rightfully all-consuming, leaving very little room for distractions or deviations. With the evolution of the culture of surgery, that is certainly changing, but if that is the starting point, change can only travel so far.
Now with more time on my hands as a surgical attending, I reopened the folder and started writing again. What started as a few cathartic narrative medicine pieces snowballed, or really avalanched, into a 100,000-word novel. A fictional story about perfectionism in medicine, immigrant debt, and finding love in all the imperfections of life. From there, the proverbial gate was opened and decades of narrative ideas flooded out, all repressed and unfiltered. I found writing an unprecedented release — prose that gave life to shapeless thoughts, words that captured the indescribable moments of vulnerability in medicine, stories that connected me deeply with readers, be it family and friends who beta-read drafts of my novel, or strangers online.
However, the entire time, I was overwhelmed with a sense of guilt. I had not been deliberately granted permission or “allowed” to forge a serious interest in something outside of medicine, to carve time away from my craft for an activity deemed less weighty and consequential. Hours disappeared into an activity that earned me no CME credit or career advancement.
Then I discovered like-minded physicians (though very few of them surgeons) who wrote everything from narrative nonfiction to beautiful poetry, to swoon-worthy romance, to epic fantasies, all with great passion. It was a community of not just physicians, but humans, eager to engage the neglected part of their soul, and in doing so I have found catharsis and meaning both within and outside of medicine.
One surgeon-writer I follow documented his journey from causing a devastating surgical complication to taking the first step back into the operating theater. Instead of swallowing his trauma and trudging forward, as surgeons are expected to do, he decided to step away and write about surgery and flyfishing as a way to heal. His story resonated with more physicians than he ever fathomed.
I used to justify my writing by telling myself that creative passion can enhance the same qualities — curiosity, empathy, persistence — that make for a great surgeon. Then I realized that I didn’t need a justification. Not everything we do has to serve the purpose of being a better physician. Beneath the white coats and scrubs, it’s perfectly acceptable to be a human who writes silly stories to their heart’s content, even if it’s about a poppy seed named Greg. Everyone deserves to be playful, to excavate their spark of creativity, buried deep under the regimented pedagogy of medicine, to indulge in it, and to discover the unexpected joy it brings.
