Starting medical school, I was nervous about a lot of things. I worried about being squeamish and my reaction to procedures, surgery and cadavers. I was so turned off by the obligatory frog dissection in junior high school, that I opted to avoid high school biology and any lab work with animals in University. This squeamishness was a strongly held belief about myself for many years: I’m not good with blood and guts.

Warning: semi-graphic descriptions to follow, stop here if you don’t want to read them.

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That belief prevented me from really giving medicine (and psychiatry) any serious consideration when I was in my 20s. It turns out though, like many fears and worries in life – those that I held were modifiable. To be clear, I felt queasy the first (and probably the second) time we went into the cadaver lab. I’m also not totally comfortable pulling heads out of buckets, in spite of how much I appreciate people donating their bodies to science for us to learn from.

I was especially worried about my first surgery. Last year, for a clinical experience we were told up to show up early and meet at the OR (operating room). This should have been a clue to me, we’d be in there for surgery but the scheduling happened so quickly I hadn’t really had time to think about it, or for that matter, let my anxiety get the better of me about it. As we donned scrubs and scrubbed in, we were handed face shields – I wondered what they were for. That became very clear during the first knee replacement surgery, where I was on the periphery and watching bone flying everywhere as the surgeon sawed into the knee. Turns out orthopaedic surgery is a lot like carpentry. I made it through the first one, and then it was my turn to be up close and personal for the second. Surprisingly, I really enjoyed it. I was getting to know the surgeon and surgical fellow, they were cracking jokes and then the surgeon handed me a drill, I shrugged and I thought “I know how to use a drill!”

I came out of that experience on a high, thinking – okay, I’ve got this med school thing!

Fast forward a year, and we’ve just recently started our Obstetrics and Gynecology course. I became nervous again given earlier in the year I felt like I was going to pass out during an IUD insertion (this was while watching the patient’s facial expressions not the business end of the procedure). This week I had my first Labour and Delivery shift. We were doing rounds and monitoring a number of women in labour and seeing Emergency Gynecology patients. Next thing I know, the doctor is paged to the OR and we’re headed up for a C-section. As we rushed to the OR and the senior resident was scrubbing in, he asked: Are you squeamish? Ever passed out? There will be lots of blood. . .

Not so far, I said.

I was happy to have the warnings not realizing until we got into the OR that this was an urgent C-section and that I would be invited to be up close and assisting where I could. There was a lot of blood, and when the water broke and was gushing all over us, although I was a little alarmed, I took a deep breath and told myself: You’ve got this. And I did have it. I was totally okay, and the pressure of getting that baby out and making sure it, and mom were okay, were far more important than anything going on in my head in that moment.

So maybe I was wrong about myself all along, or maybe I wouldn’t have been able to do med school in my 20s. However, I think it’s a good reminder of two things. One, we can always do more than we think we are capable of, and two – its’s never too late to challenge ourselves or beliefs about ourselves.

As a side note, I’ve reflected on why I felt so uneasy about the IUD insertion, and I think it’s because I’m very sensitive to other people’s pain and discomfort, and actually – that’s probably not such a bad characteristic in a physician. Also, as I saw someone on Twitter propose recently:

Why don’t we just make it a rule that if you’re going near a woman’s cervix for a procedure, there should be some kind of pain management involved?

Not going to argue with that one.