Call to adventure
If we look at our future years, what do we see?
Many will have to face a rather uncomfortable truth; Ticino.
Ticino is a monstrous three-headed dragon that holds the princess of our dreams captive in his lava castle, and for the sake of the analogy, this princess represents our master’s degree in medicine. Ticino presents new and uncharted territory, mountains yet to be conquered, an intricate jungle of strange new words that do not always resemble the trivial combo of “pizza” and “pasta”. It is metaphorically speaking the land that the hero has to travel before reaching his or hers goal. Ticino is an adventure in which transformation through learning is not only possible, but inevitable.
When we receive our places, many of us will be called for an adventure.
We will have to say goodbye to our friends, cross the 57 km long Gotthard-Basistunnel and enter the realm of the unknown. The good news is that the temperature will almost always be at least 2 degrees warmer than back in the north, and that is of course because we produce more greenhouse gases there. Please further note that time will automatically slow down, making the buses always late. The explanation for the delays is to be searched in the secrets of the general relativity and the average BMI of the Ticinese bus driver. And that is because, according to a recent study from the Human Nutrition Laboratory at the ETH Zurich, “obesity seems to be considerably more common in the southern regions, namely Ticino” (Herter-Aeberli, 2018). This is most likely due to the overall warmer temperatures and the high availability of gelato per capita. Though not all evils come to harm, and the time dilatation may also yield some advantages (a longer coffee break?).
But don’t worry too much, after arriving in Lugano we will soon meet our new friends (MRSA, tiger mosquitos and the kindest of them all, Lega dei Ticinesi) as well as our new professors, who will help us face the many challenges we will find there: not only the examinations, but also the confrontation with a new language, the extremely hard and seemingly impossible task to do the laundry on our own, to live with other people who may not speak your mother tongue and overall to adapt to a slightly different culture.
Those are hard tasks that will judge us and tell us who we truly are. We will discover parts of ourselves that we did not know where there at all. And the big revelation will be…? That we are insufficient. That everybody is flawed (and this is the really important lesson that every doctor must learn). We will maybe have to repeat some exams. Your Italian will never be perfect when you speak to Giovanni, 78 yo, in the examination room. The dirty laundry will grow like a tumorous mass under your bed (and no chemo will get rid of that!) and worst of them all: you will argue with that crazy room mate that used your reflex hammer to put a nail in the wall.
Physiologically, our basic endocrine response will be an increase in cortisol levels (yeah, that is stress), for increased alertness but a shorter life-span. The problems will continuously arise like the heads of a hydra and at one point you will break. In Ticino, the old you will metaphorically die and something new will be born instead: a future doctor.
A busy life, devoted to others, to an ideal: this is the life of a doctor. How can we conquer the hearts of the patients if you have not conquered our own?
In Ticino you will get out of your comfort zone and grow as an individual. It is an adventure, similar to the ones we see in movies. And movies are great because they put our heroes in danger, only to let us see them overcome the challenge. What can we learn from this? The tougher the better. Let’s face it: which hero can, without any preparation, suffering and endurance, beat the enemy at their first encounter? To use the words of the most famous Swiss psychiatrist:
Carl G. Jung — The Symbolic Life
“…only one who has risked the fight with the dragon and is not overcome by it wins the hoard, the treasure hard to attain. He also has a genuine claim to self-confidence, for he has faced the dark ground of his self-confidence, for he has faced the dark ground of his self and thereby has gained himself. This experience gives some faith and trust in the ability of the self to sustain him, for everything that menaced him from inside he has made his own. He has acquired the right to believe that he will be able to overcome all future threats by the same means. He has arrived at an inner certainty which makes him capable of self-reliance.”
To make it less philosophical and more down-to-earth, now it is clear why most people just hate Rey from the new Star Wars trilogy, namely because she did not do anything to obtain her powers.
[Cave: spoiler alert for Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame,
skip this whole part if you do not have yet seen those movies]
Now it is also obvious why Marvel Studios sets up our heroes to fail against Thanos, the mad titan afflicted by genocidal tendencies and affective disorders. The answer is: to prove them, build their characters and story arcs, as well as to show both us and them that their are not invincible (not to mention the 2.796 billions worldwide that Disney made with Endgame).
Though if they made so much money and if it quickly became the highest grossing movie in the history of cinema, there must be some reasons. While the general public would affirm that those movies are simply funny, graphically stunning and overall some good hours of reversible brain-death, we will take a more investigative approach and consider the less trivial solutions of the equation (always look for potential differential diagnosis, always think of Lupus!). From a deeper perspective we could argue that those movies actually teach us some things.
For example: why was the purple giant with affective disorder such an interesting charachter? Surely not because of his large Mandibula and pronounced Processus mentalis, which — to quote Peter Quill’s words directly from the movie — look like a ballsack (he definitely is not a physician with a fetish for latin terms, excuse him). A possible answer to our interrogative lies within the antagonist’s own name: Thanos, which comes directly from the greek word θάνατος (Thanatos), that literally means “death”. And it is not just the name that suggests this parallelism, but also himself, when he goes on a murdering-spree of quadrillions of people and when he says “I am … inevitable”. He therefore is the personification of death itself. And as medical students we must be fascinated by his charachter; is he not what we are fighting against all the time?
Thanos actually wins in the first movie. This was an hard lesson for our heroes. What can we learn from them, as medical students, through our parallelism? That is not always possible to save the patient, because some things are just… inevitable. And all that, just because of a name?
We all know how much ancient languanges are important to us. And if you do not agree with my abstract argumentations, I will bring you the definitive and practical proof of why you should pay attention to those words. Particularly useful in this case are the inflammation signs, namely Tumor, Rubor, Calor, Dolor and Functio laesa. Please note that those terms will (probably) get you five easy points in the dermatology exam!
To conclude, we would like to throw a rather provocative parallelism.
Let me introduce ETHANOS, which to be clear is not a peculiar form of ethanol, but rather a monstrous chimera resembling both Thanos and our beloved faculty director (try to picture in your head the first guy with the other’s moustaches!). This horrible creature haunts us in our dreams and is trying to kill us since we started our bachelor. How do we defeat him? A lot of planning, careful studies, courage and sacrifices. Maybe we will menage smoothly, maybe Loki fucks all the things up. But it doesn’t matter…
[spoiler alert lifts]
Because the best teacher of all is failure. And failure is only possible where there is risk. And where there is risk, there is an adventure. That is my call for adventure to every collegue. We are explorers, and remember…
“We choose to go to Ticino…we choose to go to Ticino in this decade and do the ETH, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
John F. Kennedy (edited by the author)