How to kill your adventurous spirit.

A story in three acts.

Picture by Maria José Bosch

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Podéis encontrar una versión en español aquí.

As I mentioned in one of my previous stories, which you can find here, doctors spend an inordinate amount of time fantasising about quitting medicine and finding another job, but we rarely do so. A lot of people have asked me why I became a doctor, and my answer is a truly boring one. Do the test- ask any person in the healthcare system, and their answer will invariably be some mash-up of “I like helping people” and “I like science”. These answers become really tedious since we doctors are far from original in the inception of our careers.

The question you need to be asking is, “Why are you still a doctor?” and that is when the fun begins.  

I did that exercise not long ago with my colleagues, and as the answers trickled in, they kept me up all night trying to find patterns.  One of the messages that stood out was about convenience. Some people expressed that this job was meaningful and convenient at the same time. “Not everybody gets the chance to help other people so close to home”. This, of course, comes from a bunch of middle-aged doctors with no sense of adventure, that yearning that most of us experience from 12 till 25, and that dies slowly, suffocated under the weight of an ever-growing pile of responsibilities. I find that as we age, we often regret our uneventful lives, wondering what would have happened had we taken the proverbial less travelled road.  Working in cancer care, this aspect of life is often very present in conversations with patients who have an incurable disease. But the sad part is that we seem to need a life-threatening excuse to ask ourselves about the things we really want.

My anecdotal experiences have a scientific back-up. A very thought-provoking study one can read here highlights that “people of different ages and diverse demographics … more often regret the things they could have done than the things they should have done.” This is a very tough pill to swallow.

Having made up my mind from a young age not to be one of those people who regretted ignoring their sense of adventure, I took a genial approach to this conundrum and made sure I killed my adventurous soul stone-cold before I reached the age of twenty-four. For this, I used the very well-known three-step approach: learn-practice-master.

Being the generous person I am (after all, I am a doctor), I have decided to share my journey with anyone who would care to read. Please take notes.

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Step one- learn

Dig- A story about archaeology.

Reconstructed version of “La Torrecilla” Chelva, Valencia circa 2023.

Source: Google Maps

When I was eighteen, I started medical school. In most European countries, this is a six-year-long commitment to studying very long hours to have a very limited scope on work-life. One studies medicine to become a doctor, which is a very narrow path. In my younger years, I often found myself second-guessing the most vital decisions I had made, so I wanted to make sure I understood what I was missing out on by not becoming something else.  Therefore, when I was nineteen, after a whole year of studying like a nut job, I decided to try on a new identity as an archaeologist during the summer break. I signed up for a 15-day experience in a small town close to where I come from to work on an archaeological dig.

“What an adventure”- I thought, although the trip door to door took about 30 minutes. I envisioned myself in a Sakalov with a magnifying lens, duster, pencils, sketch pad, and small brushes. I guess the buckets, the spades, and the picks of agricultural size I found at the door of the hostel we were staying at should have been a big red flag. Had I been sharp enough, I might have gotten the next bus home. Just to dispel any doubts about what the archaeological adventure entailed, there came the project manager the next morning. He was extremely kind and, between jokes and smiles, instructed us to get a spade, a pick and a bucket each and walked us to a nearby hill.

“Do you see that hill?” He asked with inquiring eyes.

We were already tired from the march carrying heavy tools, so we timidly responded- “Yes?” Trying to figure out if he meant to make us walk to the top under the weight of the gear.

“Do you see the tower on top of the hill?” He asked next.

Here, we could assert firmly there was no tower in sight.

“Well, you have to dig until it comes out.” And with that, he started to divide the tasks among us and give each team careful instructions on how to proceed.

That was that for my archaeological aspirations. I spent 15 days digging non-stop, carrying buckets of soil from the top down, and eating like an elephant after 8 hours of free hard labour. Have I mentioned I had paid to partake in this experience?

As part of the adventure, the camp managers arranged various excursions to give us the feeling of a holiday of sorts. One of these was a river descent, which I really looked forward to, given the torrid heat of the Valencian summer. At this point in the story, I should mention that I had convinced my boyfriend at the time to enrol with me in this “fun fifteen-day archaeological fest”, and we were already eying each other with contempt three days into the trip. 

Cutting to the point, we did this river descent with just our regular trainers, no helmet, no other protective gear.

“A T-shirt, bathing suit, and shorts will suffice.” They said.

“It will be fun!” They said.

At some point, I had scratched all the skin off my back on every rock of the river bed and was sure my wounds were festering with water parasites. We came to a place with a tiny cascade we needed to jump from. I am not sure what happened here. I tripped and got my foot stuck between two rocks, fell with my foot still stuck at the top of the cascade, water coming down on me, with my head upside down, unable to breathe; the people on the bottom side of the cascade pulling my arms to drag down my already battered body.

Longest 20 seconds of my life. Longest fifteen days of my youth.

Back at home, my boyfriend would suggest shortly after to take a permanent break. I did not complain or cry. I could do nothing but agree. I learned that self-imposed hardship does not bring people together and that maybe “adventure” was not really the thing for me.

Ruta de l’aigua, Chelva, Valencia, where I nearly met my ultimate fate.

Source: Google maps

Coming soon: step two- practice.

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