Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So_ A Memoir - Mark Vonnegut [53]
When we told people we couldn’t see any more patients, mothers pressed their babies and children toward us against the chain-link fence.
“No pelota.” We’d run out of the tennis balls after day two.
Friday was mostly spent cleaning up. Two of the doctors from the adult side brought over a beaming twelve-year-old boy whom I didn’t recognize until they showed me the wound and wick from where we had drained the abscess Monday. We took out the gauze wick and covered the wound with antibiotic ointment and a sterile dressing.
“We did him some good,” said one of the docs. The mother was effusively grateful. I couldn’t help thinking how easily it could have been otherwise.
About midnight the night before we left, Max and I borrowed a car and went back out to the clinic site. In the moonlight we could see that nothing was left. A battalion of recyclers must have descended and stripped the place bare. All the cardboard, the wiring, even the litter was all gone. It was like we had never been there. Come Monday they would have school and most of the kids would have new, slightly used tennis balls.
There was a three-hour layover in Houston. Crystal and I got a cab and went shopping at a nearby mall to buy sunglasses and gifts. It was more or less like any other shopping mall. We got coffee and doughnuts and bought Houston Rockets T-shirts, all of which were available at the airport, then made a mad headlong dash to make it back in time for our flight. The flirtation never came close to being anything more, but it scared the hell out of me how much fun it was palling around with a girl.
The pictures I took in Honduras came out well, and I made up a slide show to go along with a talk I presented at senior rounds. The chief asked if I’d consider giving the talk at grand rounds, which was held in the same amphitheater where I occasionally went to AA meetings on Fridays. Out of the blue the dean of admissions of Harvard Medical School showed up in my office, took me out for lunch, and asked if I’d consider serving on the admissions committee.
“Yes, yes,” I said. “Yes.”
Mark goes mainstream.
If you know how things are going to turn out, why bother?
(Photo by Barb Vonnegut)
chapter 12
Not Right for Here
Normal people do not make particularly good doctors. They’re too good at taking care of themselves to be able to take good care of strangers.
The Harvard Medical School admissions committee sees a steady line of bright, creative young people who are eager, ready, willing, and able to give of themselves for a chance to be useful. Six thousand apply, eight hundred are invited to be interviewed, and two hundred of those are accepted.
Once the first forty-two hundred or so have been eliminated, the quality of those left is so high that a perfectly good class could be selected by flipping coins and throwing darts. Many applicants rejected by Harvard go elsewhere and become excellent doctors. Except for one psychopath, there was no one I interviewed who couldn’t have become a good doctor. Beyond the pool of applicants selected for interviews, there are many qualified people who want to be doctors who can’t get into any American medical school and who have to go to Guadalajara or the Caribbean to pursue their dream.
I seriously doubt that my application would have made the first cut against today’s applicant pool. No candidate whose application I reviewed or heard of had anywhere near as low an undergraduate math-and-science grade-point average as mine. It’s possible the committee members of the day, back then, were distracted by the question of whether or not I was schizophrenic and overlooked my grades.
Interviewees invariably talked about how much they wanted to contribute to society, help people, push medical science forward. When I asked them what being a doctor was going to do for them, often they looked at me like was a trick question.
We rate applicants on a scale of 1 to 10, but you quickly learn that