Changing the world

Since it is Monday and the beginning of a new school year for many, I am thinking about the impact each of us has on the world. When I was younger, middle school and high school, my greatest desire was to make some world changing discovery. A cure for a deadly disease or an invention to ease human suffering was my goal.

With time and age, by about my second year of college, I realized these types of discoveries where a combination of brilliance and luck. Since I possessed neither in large quantities, I settled down to the slow, grinding task of preparing myself for medical school. In another couple of years, I realized that some combination of brilliance and luck were required for medical school admission also. Since I was short on the first, I would have to say it was the second of those two commodities which landed me in that now Well-Known Medical College of the south.

Getting back to change, it seems it comes in one of two forms. Change is either slow and insidious, something we are not able to appreciate in our life time. A physical example of this is the Grand Canyon. Or change is cataclysmic, the death of the dinosaurs (and many other forms of life) in a short span of time.

In the last 18 months, I have learned I am not going to have any type of meteoric change on the health care system, even in Major Metropolitan City. Hopefully, however, I am making some type of difference in the landscape, at least where the lives of my patients and colleagues are concerned.