I asked God to show me something today.

Today, I saw a man's distended and bloody colon protruding from his abdomen. A nurse was dabbing at the flow nonchalantly with a wet washcloth.

Today, I and another volunteer gloved up and rubbed lotion in between the cracked and calloused toes of a 400-lb man. I won't be soon forgetting the chemical perfume smell of lotion mingling with the ripe odor of unwashed feet, or the feeling of rough, scaly skin that tore a hole in my glove.

Tonight, I went to a health seminar given by Dr. Igor Mitrovic from UCSF for my program tonight, expecting the talk to be about clinical physiology research. That's what the email said.

But instead, we engaged for two hours in conversation about why we want to be physicians. One question that Dr. Mitrovic asked was, "What's your biggest fear?" Some people said fear of failure or letting people down. Most people called on said fear of losing family members or loved ones.

I said, "I fear becoming desensitized to the sufferings of the world." He asked me to explain.

I said that the more I see events that are disheartening, traumatic, or sad, I want to protect myself from it. Little by little, I detach myself from the emotions associated with pain. The scariest thing to me is if I were to someday see one too many dead bodies and say to myself, "It's only a dead body" as if it were nothing at all. I think that would be much worse than losing people, which will inevitably happen as we grow older; but to lose one's own humanity...that is something else. I've mused about this topic more than once on this blog--whether it be dealing with mice in the lab, or people at the Emergency Department. I've never blogged about the hardest things I've experienced at the ED, but some of you knew when they happened, and some of you could see it on my face on Fridays at Large Group. This will be something that I will no doubt be wondering about for the rest of my life if I go into healthcare, and even if I don't.

This is largely incomplete...but I have things to do so I will leave it at this.