Amenorrhea in Medicine

Forgive this post because it is going to sound like rambling but I've been thinking about this for awhile now and finally took some time to write my thoughts:

I was never that bright eyed student entering medical school with matching socks and matching pens. I never loved to read, to memorize, to sit for hours on end for a dream. I entered this field knowing the gravity of a knife in my hands and I knew that no matter how much I studied, how hard I tried, people will die. I just didn’t know how much it would hurt.

Nobody talks about the pain of being a physician. We are described as “smart”, “hard-working”, and if you are lucky: “intimidating”. But somewhere along the way, “full of feeling” became a negative term; one conjuring up images of menopausal women. But being human means understanding not only how our bodies work but also how it feels.

I remember my first cut into a cadaver; I cried. Ashamed, I wiped away my tears and carried on like nothing was wrong but my cadaver was a human being. She came with red nail polish and the scars from an apartment fire that should have ended her life. She had a husband, a son, and a commitment to medical education that made her last gift mine. Yet I was ashamed to feel in that first cut her presence…her history…her soul.

I remember my first week in clinic; I also cried. I had spent too long fumbling my way through a patient history and my preceptor had berated me in front of my peers. I realized in that moment how ironic this profession is. To get here, we were all boosted by our teachers, mentors, families, friends, etc. We were told countless times “you will be great”, “we are proud of you”, “I am proud of you”, etc. Yet once we enter this profession, humanism is secondary to achievement, competition, hard-work, and efficiency. None of these things allow us to experience and process pain.

I learned the anatomy of the word pain in my first year of medical school. “Intense, damaging, stimuli on peripheral nerve fibers”….”most common reason patients seek physician consult”…(these are all in my notes). “Without this feeling, we are unable to protect damaged body parts while it heals.” But when the damage is internal and the patient experiencing the pain is a physician who can they seek for help? I was lucky that I had a mentor who expressed condolence for my stories and encouraged me to move forward yet many medical students and doctors don’t have this. They grow numb, they carry on before they can heal and they lose their capacity to feel not only pain but its antithesis: joy.

The companion of pain is healing; the companion of menopause is reproduction. Humanism lies in companionship; the doctor’s relationship to his patient, the sadness of watching someone lose their loved one and the grace in understanding that you may be helpless today but full of power tomorrow. The barrier to humanism is one that we have erected; a lack of honor for pain and a blind eye to its existence in our own lives. Amenorrhea in medicine is engulfing our capacity to reproduce the humanism we so desperately need.