If I was a Doctor what would I be doing? This is not the first time this idea has occurred to me. I had a dream about it years ago, that I still remember quite vividly. I was wearing a white coat and going from room to room examing patients with a team of nurses, I was telling them what was to be done for the patient, most of the treatments that I recommended were with the use of natural remedies. Strange that it wasn’t using allopathic medicine. Maybe these were hopeless cases or maybe the treatment was simple enough that it could be used, or maybe the patients simply could not afford traditional medicine. For whatever the reason, I had the answers, I knew how to diagnose and I recommended the remedy. That is a good feeling to be respected. It’s also a good feeling to have useful information that can help someone or possibly save their life. Some of these patients had bedsores so deep that you could see their bone. I was a compassionate caregiver in my dream.
Along the same lines of helping someone in a medical capacity I had thought about having a Doctoral in Education and worked as a research assistant for a time. That one experience changed my mind about doing doctoral research because of the exhausting process of helping someone else achieve their dream, I didn’t have the strength to do it for myself.
Other times I have been approached by someone in private and asked for counsel. So these experiences made me think I might like being a Psychiatrist. I was beside myself to give any tangible advice to anyone at the time. It always seems to me that it was just at that moment a perfect stranger trusted me enough to share a confidence. It happened so much that I thought hey I should be getting paid for this! Once again I had the remedy, even though I wasn’t aware. I don’t feel I would be much help to a person who was terribly sick however, like someone with an aberrant behavior problem. I will leave that level of abnormal psychology to the forensic experts.
At the heart of what each human needs is just someone to listen. Someone to withhold judgment for a moment and let them just share what is on their heart. This is a very difficult thing to do because if we feel uncomfortable we want to say or do something to exit the conversation. If however, we do stay and try not to solve the problem for them, something very significant happens. They find a solution themselves. We can ask a series of questions that can be helpful to guide them but ultimately it is their decision which direction they want to take with their problem. We can help them isolate the feeling and feel it for that 50 minutes in conversation.
Being a classroom teacher for ESL has brought me into some very deep discussions with my students. What can start out as general topics for discussion in the thought process of opening up can trigger some memories that people have remained closed up about. So, we cannot predict what people might say when we invite or give them the opportunity to say whats on their mind.
At present, I don’t have the answer for what kind of Dr. I would be. What I do know is that I have the desire, whether I have the steam or not to do it? That is a mystery.
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