"It's ok to ask for help."

I found a website today entitled, "You were doing it wrong". Essentially it's a compilation of confessions from people who realized, late in life that they've been doing things wrong - sometimes the stories are innocuous, sometimes embarrasing and funny. There's a lot of people who mention that they've never learned to pronounce words properly (e.g. segue, salmon, etc.). One person mentioned how they finally learned to eat a kiwi (cut in half and eat with a spoon) and afterwards, 5 people replied with astonishment - they too didn't know how to eat a kiwi properly!


So as I said, most of the stories are funny. But this one caught my eye because it was so much longer than the others. And upon reading it I couldn't help but be touched. It was pretty damned amazing. So amazing that I wanted to repost it here.

There are two things I've done wrong for most of my life.

My folks came over from Korea, and I was born a year after they'd arrived. I grew up in a traditional Korean household, as the oldest of three boys, and was tasked with the duties and responsibilities one would imagine as being typical for anyone who is the oldest sibling of a bunch, as well as being expected to pursue the prototypical and stereotyped alpha Asian male: be the second head of the household, behind the father, accept responsibility for the stupid things your younger siblings may have done, excel in all things academic, and become successful in a professional sense.

So I did all that. I didn't know what else I could do. I studied everything, with most things being genuinely interesting, and a few things being completely dull but pursued due to parental pressure. From an early age, I was picked out from amongst the other school kids and underwent rigorous testing, just to prove I could score greater than the XXth percentile on one test or another. I was given labels as a testament to my test-taking abilities, but the only ones that really stuck were "geek," "nerd," and other pretty base terms that didn't have much to do with intellect at all.

When there was a question, I was expected to answer it. Not just simple questions, but questions that had to do with culture (I'm a first-generation American), or questions regarding neighborhood or family politics (yes, there are neighborhood elders or Korean "godfathers," and all sorts of other related nonsense).

I grew to be a jack-of-all-trades, master of none. I knew a lot about a lot of things, a little about almost everything, but not everything about anything. I had a brief stint at an Ivy League university, at a relatively young age, lived on my own, read Atlas Shrugged, and everything clicked: I am great. I am smart. I will be successful.

I went on to medical school, and for reasons I'll get to in a moment, ended up pursuing a residency in primary care, forgoing the more competitive specialties. I was at the top of my game, and then a whole bunch of things happened at once.

Pop got sick. Really sick. Girl cheated on me, left me. I had no money. I was going to two different plasma centers, cheating the system by coating my pinky nail with nail polish and using acetone I hoarked from the med school to get rid of the dye that lit up under a blacklight at the plasma places, used to mark people so that they couldn't go to multiple centers. I don't think it fooled anyone. I was depressed. Everyone's still looking to me to be the head of the household while my father wasn't doing so well. My academic performance suffered, I shunned my friends, and I tried to fix things on my own, the way I'd always done-- the way I was raised to do.

Professors and attendings would ask if I was ok. Is everything ok? You look worn out. Is everything ok? And I'd say, yeah, everything's fine. I'll just study more, or work more, and things will improve.

Things didn't improve.

One snowless February afternoon (For some reason I always remember it being snowless, even though it almost never snows here), as I was walking back from giving plasma, I got really, really cold. Entering my apartment, I got really lightheaded, and I had a sudden urge to take a shit. So I went. All that plasma they take out of you while you're watching Lifetime movies on those small TVs with the bums who're wondering what a Korean guy is doing giving plasma in an area with no Asian people? They replace it with saline. And that saline must've just gone straight into my bowels. I had a single bout of massive diarrhea, barely made it to bed, and woke up twenty hours later.

I gave up on donating plasma. A few days later, I was stopped in the hallway by the head of neurology-- this is a guy I really didn't know, and he said something like this to me: Hey, look. Look. I don't know what's going on, and I don't know what you're going through. It's none of my business. And then he said this, verbatim: "It's ok to ask for help." And he gave me the number to a psychiatrist.

And really, seriously: I might post funny stories about apples, or other humorous anecdotes about The Way Things Are, but that one phrase was like discovering something so wondrous, so foreign, that my brain could never have fathomed it as a possibility. It's ok to ask for help. So I did. And things got better. My colleagues helped me. My friends helped me. My family helped me: people whom I've known for my entire life helped me. It's always been easy for me to tell other people "that's what friends are for," or "that's what family's for," but it took me decades to accept it for myself as even a mere possibility.

I am very successful now. Professionally, yes, but more importantly, personally: I have FRIENDS. I have FAMILY. I know now that I've had and will always have people who will not simply support me, but HELP me. And more than anything else, these simple facts have helped me become the physician I am now: have advanced my career to the point of pretty much absolute success and satisfaction. My patients like me. Their families like me. The hospital staff likes me. I have the respect of my peers. I feel that I am a decent physician, and a good man. Why?

Because I take my time to break things down so that people understand what I'm talking about when it comes to their loved ones. Because I know it's not just enough to take care of the patient, but that it's also my responsibility to take care of the family and friends and their bedside. Because I am able to admit, often remind myself of, and am supremely humbled by the fact that I was so wrong about two things for most of my life: that for all I may think I know, there's so much I do not know and cannot even fathom to know, still. And that it's ok to ask for help.

I was also wrong about Atlas Shrugged being great.
posted by herrdoktor at 8:12 PM on July 6 [277 favorites]