Not all the children grew up

It seems to be a universally accepted fact that eventually everyone grows up. Some exceptions are allowed for blue collar employees who occasionally quarrel within the confines of their environment and require mediation by supervisors, but certainly no professional would ever revert to playground style tactics to settle a dispute with fellow co-workers. By virtue of being a professional---having diligently toiled away at years of books, lectures, and institutional etiquette ---to have achieved such a lofty position, white collar workers must certainly have mastered even the most subtle of interworkplace diplomacy. One rests assured that all disputes among doctors are handled in the most mature of fashions. To expend any further concern over the subject would be a disappointing waste of mental resources.

Physicians however, tend to be some of the most immature “adults” I have met. As a group we represent the sum total of all of those children in school, whom under no circumstances would share their hard earned homework answers with another. And most certainly not minutes before class started. God forbid, that the fruits of our previous evening’s endeavors, spent toiling to complete the malicious homework our classroom dictators assigned, be shared with an undeserving sloth who chose to let their own precious twighlight hours be consumed by sit-coms or telephone conversations with the opposite sex. Those unfortunate heathens, as misguided as they may have been, needed to learn for themselves, that only appropriately guided energy and effort would be met with reward on a regular basis in the bowels of our society’s academic institutions.

I’ve noted several times in the past, that most physicians have been placed upon a pedestal by their parents since they were two years old. Many came from lineages littered with physicians or other nobles of advanced academic training. To trivialize the contribution of this fact towards the professionalism of such offspring would be negligent.

I myself, did not benefit (or is that suffer ?) from this level of child worship. I was not slated to be the next benefactor of my family name. I was not going to charge valiantly into the books of Who’s Who to take my rightful place alongside previous generations of accomplished family members. I was going to be lucky at best, and that would have been good enough for my parents.

When, at twenty-seven years of age, I announced to my parents, that I was going to apply to medical school, I was met with a less than reassuring facial tone, and an even more bewildering low vocal grunt, as though the time had now come for them to reveal some deep dark family secret.

That secret of course, was that they had been resolved some 15 years earlier to the fact that auto-mechanics 101 was going to be the pinnacle of my academic triumph. They were okay with this; they just hadn’t foreseen the now present need to exhume a well settled grave in which my own pedestal had long since been laid to rest.

The grandiosity of most physician’s childhoods was even more exemplified, when on the first day of medical school a behavioral psychologist gave a heartfelt lecture offering emotional support and counseling to the 50% of the class whom, for the first time in their lives, would be receiving grades below the class average. Up until that very point, 99% of the student body had been accustomed to grade point averages in the upper fifth percentile. Many had never made a “B” in there life. (The spoils of not sharing one’s homework)

I immediately raised my hand and selflessly proclaimed that I would graciously accept a position in the lower half of the class standing, thus relieving the burden of at least one student from having to explain the drastic deviation of his/her scholastic activity to their parents.

The humor was lost on the class.

Later, I found out, that doctors in general don’t have a sense of humor. (but that’s another story)

Now that I have established a basic premise of why, doctors may not mature along that same lines as other more well socialized sorts, let me offer my motivation for bringing it up in the first place.

I had a run-in. More like an exposure. I unknowingly engaged in a schoolyard quarrel with a fifth grader that SOMEONE saw fit to give a Medical Doctorate to. I was blind sided! I didn’t see it coming. Here we were, two seemingly adult-like individuals, professionals even, that were carrying on a discussion, a difference of opinion, a discourse, an enlightened sharing of ideas, when out of nowhere my opponent ran screaming like a banshee to the principal’s office to rat on me.

Actually “rat” isn’t the right word. More specifically, this juvenile simply made the first attempt a getting his side of the story to the ears of the highest disciplinarian so that his version could be sculpted into the history books as gospel, before I might supply an alternative perspective on the proceedings.

He called the Colonel.

He complained to the Colonel about my not playing fair.

Did I mention that he called the Colonel at midnight?

I think the guy was asleep.

Guess what the Colonel said.

“Settle it amongst yourselves”

I think I actually heard the click from across the room as the Colonel hung up.

Then it dawned upon me.

This dick hadn’t grown up.

That was it! This was that same scrawny little kid in school that used to run and tell on every classmate her ever saw or heard about committing a classroom infraction. I had found him! After all these years! You know the one. Everyone went to school with at least one of these little tattle-tales. This was the kid that spent so much time worrying that they would accidentally do something wrong and get in trouble for it, that they felt it was their obligation to turn-in and report everyone else’s wrong doings.

Here he was. He still hadn’t learned to fight his own battles. He still hadn’t learned to discuss things with his adversaries. He most certainly hadn’t learned that not everyone is going to do things his way. The idea that a person might actually have a different way to go about doing things, and that the whole world is not black and white, right from wrong, had simply been wasted on this child. He hadn’t grown up.

Sure he looked grown up. He had a degree. Of course he had a degree. We all knew that these little stool pigeons were all going to get degrees. They were going to go on and do great things with their lives. They had to. Their parents had already purchased their pedestals and had their busts carved out of the finest marble!

But some where along the way of Valedictorian, Research Grant Winner, Benefactor of the Hard Sciences, these kids never learned just to play fair. They never learned how to share a Big-Wheel^tm, spin double on a Sit-n-Spin^tm, Ride on the handle bars of another’s bicycle, and eat out of the same box of pop-corn.

The same neurologic sequence of nerve firings took place in his head just like it had for the past 30 years. Oops---Conflict---Run and Get the Principal.

He was that same kid.

Since then, I have started to re-visit the various characters I went to school with. I have been comparing them to adults I meet on a daily basis. It has been interesting what new insight my observations are affording me. I am noticing more and more behaviors I thought I left behind on the blacktop. Children deal with playground stress and encounters in a number of ways. As children this is accepted. Part of growing up it to learn what is socially acceptable and what is not, what works and what doesn’t. Plenty of books have been written on the subject. My observations are nothing new.

What has come to me as an epiphany, is that here, the bold letters of MD behind one’s name, the respected position of Captain in the US ARMY, and the thirty candles on the yearly birthday cake, masked the underlying assumption that all the children grow up.

Not all of them do.