Not All Roads Lead to Rome

A few days ago, I was trying to put on a T-shirt and couldn't manage it. Two years ago, Laura had tested her little sharp teeth on one of my T-shirts. After losing that battle, the T-shirt was left with four tiny holes, like a punched tram ticket. That morning, I was trying to figure out whether this was the perforated T-shirt or not. Due to my lack of imagination, I prefer buying the same T-shirt, in the same size, several times. Somehow, choosing what to wear that day becomes easier, and black and white go with almost any other color. I picked up the black T-shirt and looked where the little holes should have been. I couldn't find anything. Not entirely trusting my eyes, I decided to turn it over and check whether the holes might be on the other side. As I was doing this, I suddenly realized my own stupidity. Who looks for a hole on both sides?

At that moment, I began questioning my own intelligence. The reaction of turning the T-shirt over and checking the other side was an instant reflex, so I can't say it affected my self-esteem too much. But I suddenly became aware of one thing: if someone had seen me at that moment, they wouldn't have considered me particularly intelligent. There I was, standing with the freshly turned T-shirt in my hands, judging myself as stupid. Imagine what someone else would have thought. I tried to remember other moments when I hadn't exactly displayed flashes of genius. Moments when your brain apparently goes on vacation, and your reflexes are among the stupidest imaginable. Although I couldn't quickly come up with other situations quite as embarrassing, I started thinking about the idea of being a doctor.

Although I have a good opinion of myself, I couldn't help noticing that anyone evaluating me at that particular moment would have entrusted me with far more mundane tasks. Is it possible that a single moment in our lives can push us onto a different trajectory, one we initially cannot even identify? What happens to children who are labeled by their teachers as having limited intellectual abilities? When is it appropriate to make such an observation, and what happens if teachers fail to stimulate children and push them toward greatness? In my university group, I can think of a few people who simply didn't have the intellectual abilities required to become doctors. Similarly, I've met intelligent people working physical rather than intellectual jobs who could certainly have handled the latter without any problems.

The environment you find yourself in probably contributes enormously to your development. I, for example, attended a mediocre high school in Craiova. My father had attended the same school twenty years earlier. Back then, it was considered a good school. But the standards by which it was evaluated were old and communist. Nevertheless, I was admitted to this high school in eighth place among all the students. I still remember how it happened. I remember my parents studying the lists posted outside the school, starting from the bottom and working their way up, trying to find my name. They always stopped when they reached somewhere around twentieth place. I didn't stop, though, and I found myself. The fact that I was among the top students admitted there means nothing. The school itself was mediocre at best. Out of a class of thirty students, I was the spearhead. We were the kind of students nobody expected to amount to much. And most of them really didn't. That's why the teachers didn't have particularly high expectations of us either. Although I can say that we were learning things, I never felt genuinely challenged. In my eternal laziness, I actually liked the situation.

When we started programming computers in tenth grade, the entire concept of school education went out the window. In computer science classes, I was the only one interested in computers. Everyone else in my class just wanted to play Minesweeper or Go. Our teacher was a young guy who had just graduated from university, though I wondered how he'd managed that. He had a problem with teaching skills, in the sense that he had none. And he had a problem with authority, because most of us wouldn't have guessed he was older than eighteen. Somehow, in my free time, I tried to teach myself new things. I'd grab my Pascal programming books and disappear for the weekend. From Friday evening until Monday morning, I did nothing but experiment with writing code and creating programs. I'd start with a small idea, an experiment simply for the sake of building something. And that little program would take on a life of its own. By Monday morning, it would have metamorphosed into such a creature that I felt I had to show it to my teacher. I'd bring it to school on 3.5-inch floppy disks and explain it to him. The moment I realized it was a waste of time was when I understood that he couldn't follow the code. He asked me to make him a copy so he could study it quietly on his own. As far as I was concerned, he could shove it up his ass, because I had no intention of bothering him again.

From that moment on, this teacher lost all my respect. At the same time, he didn't ask me to participate too actively in class either, knowing that whatever material he wanted to discuss or present would bore me. So what was the point of these classes for me? Why attend a high school specializing in mathematics and computer science if, after two years, I was already overqualified for computer science? Not mathematics, though. I was never overqualified for that. Mathematics and I have been enemies for life, so I've never had the slightest clue about mathematics.

When I left high school and entered university, I ended up in an equally impressive group. Apart from two or three colleagues, none of the others were the serious type, the kind of people I could challenge myself alongside. I'm still in contact with only two of them today, and ironically, neither stayed in Romania to practice medicine. I still remember how many clinical rotations were practically ruined by my colleagues' lack of interest. The doctors and professors would lose interest in explaining things to us when they saw that our attention was elsewhere. And me... I was too cool not to be part of their group. I had no intention of being the one who wanted to hear more. The moment I joined the dark forces came in my fourth year, when one of our teaching assistants, a young internal medicine resident, asked me, "So, Daniel? What interesting things have you been reading lately?" It was obvious she meant medical literature, but my pride and youthful arrogance prevented me from answering honestly. And although I was genuinely interested in what she had to say, I smiled and replied, "I read a good book... Shogun." To this day, I'm ashamed of that answer.

A few years later, I had the opportunity to reverse the roles, taking twenty medical students on a clinical round through the hospital. This time, the action took place in Germany, at the university hospital in Frankfurt. We were discussing epidural analgesia at a patient's bedside. Not one of them told me they'd been reading Shogun. They were all interested in hearing what I had to say.

My wife, on the other hand, was always surrounded by high achievers. During high school, all her classmates were focused on studying and developing themselves. Besides the fact that she attended the best high school in the city rather than some no-name school like mine, every single one of them became something. They all made something of themselves. I've had the opportunity to meet some of them over the years, and they're people with whom you can genuinely have a conversation. Later, at university, she ended up in a good group as well. I can't say she was once again among the elite, because that would mean admitting just how far behind my own group was. But I can admit that, on average, her group studied for a single exam as much as my entire group studied for the whole examination period. If I had to let some of our former colleagues treat me, I'd immediately run to hers. While most of my university colleagues stayed in Romania out of convenience and a desire to avoid complications, I genuinely believe that hers stayed because they chose to. They could certainly have worked as equals in any Western European healthcare system.

In a bizarre way, the two of us are like Beauty and the Beast, like Lady and the Tramp. She has always been one step ahead of me. She attended better schools, had more select social circles, and had colleagues who pushed and supported her along the way. Me? I had colleagues who dragged me down, questionable company, and I often had to be the tip of the spear myself. A spearhead completely unmotivated for the task. How we can work today as two equal colleagues is beyond my understanding. Perhaps I closed the distance between us at a gallop. That's what I tell myself, thinking about how I was accepted into university hospitals. But there are still moments when I wonder whether it wasn't me who galloped faster, but perhaps her who galloped more slowly. Perhaps she simply waited for me, just enough that I wouldn't notice what was happening.

And if this can be the difference between two people with similar backgrounds, from the same city, and close in age, what happens when their paths truly diverge? What happens when one eight-year-old child is pushed in one direction while another is pushed in a completely different one? What happens to equal opportunities?

This is a thought I've been having quite often lately. A thought I couldn't begin this text with without going through this entire gallop first. Lately, I've become increasingly aware that all roads may lead to Rome, but not all travelers are the same. Some people are extremely proud of their profession. Many practically glow at the mere thought of introducing themselves as Doctor... Not me. Lately, I've become increasingly humble, more reserved, often embarrassed. I don't want to introduce myself as Doctor, and I don't want to build unnecessary walls between myself and my patients. I'm also embarrassed by the fact that I don't know what opportunities they had. What path brought them to where they are today? And I wonder whether they had the same opportunities I did.

Introducing yourself as Doctor Popescu to someone who had to start working in a restaurant at the age of fourteen to support themselves is not a battle you want to win. It's a battle you really don't want to fight in the first place. First of all, they already know who you are. That's why they're coming to you. And secondly, you won't have gained anything.

A few days ago, a similar thought crossed my mind. In my post “Whisper… Whisper, Little Nightingale,” I also thought about this: the inequality of opportunity. I saw all those little shoes lined up at kindergarten, and I wondered whether the children wearing them would all have the same opportunities in life. Whether they would all get an equal start. I wish all children could be born equal, that they could all benefit from the same start in life. How do we manage to change that?