The Arts and Humanities of Anesthesia

by Mary Sweeney

The farther I get into the journey of a medical student, the more familiar I become with the exhaustion that pervades the field of medicine. Whether wincing at the decreasingly impressive “Oh just you wait ‘til residency” line or the imminent visit notes that float above every encounter, you can lose sight of the importance these moments carry. But the choice to go into medicine is important, and when you were accepted it’s likely that your heart had a single palpitation as you entered the long line of healers that came before you. And yet, much of the day-to-day is not as glorious. Wake up, Anki, UWorld, whir around the hospital see-sawing from anxious uncertainty to awe and do it all again! A real, live, twenty-first century, fluorescently lit, linoleum-laden merry-go-round. It means a lot when your feet find a certain footing. So it meant a lot to me when during my third year I discovered the study of Anesthesiology. I saw it on the outskirts of the hospital encounter, and then guiding patients through their stays. It was quietly artful in its delivery, and I knew that I could become deeply appreciative of it in the way that I grew to love painting, writing, and music.

As someone who has loved writing and painting for years, I have learned to relish in these details of insignificance: the punctuation of the cardiac monitor, the trailing medical student, the seasoned ICU nurse. Even the linoleum floors can cast a pleasant light when it’s three in the morning and they are freshly cleaned. For most of my third year it was these glimpses that kept me in touch with the world of the humanities, even as my days of writing seemed to park themselves in the rearview. It was a surprise when I found the same love in the hum of beeps, the measuring and titration of medicines, and the dynamic field of Anesthesiology—it showed me that art isn’t something that is superimposed on medicine, it is something that can be achieved through medicine. I wanted to understand the innumerable bags hung behind the cardiac patients undergoing bypass, the drips keeping beat as they run through the plastic tubing. The patient’s physiologic state translated by machines and adjusted in real time became something completely new and wonderful.

There is a heartfelt art that underlies this cacophony of monitors and measurements, a series of precise adjustments made to fit the individual patient. The providers are changing the size of the tube, reversing the medications, adding or subtracting from standard procedures, constantly, with the patient’s care as the artist’s ultimate vision. This process is familiar to me, operating in multiple views at once: the broad strokes that make up the basic outline of planning for a case, to reflexive changes like a vent setting, or a last-minute pivot when the clinical setting takes a sudden change. It is something that I can understand as I understand the evolution of a painting—I can study a landscape and prepare the stages of a piece, but there is always that element of unpredictability, the flux of real life that I must respond to for the painting to evolve into something I could have never entirely planned for.

In undertaking medicine there is a lot of sacrifice, and we go through serious changes as medical students. We give our time to develop our minds into the greatest tools for helping people, and that means less video games, less going out on a random Tuesday, or if you’re me, less painting. Before school I had a lot of free time to practice art and writing—I had time to consider philosophies and ideas, and I enjoyed it very much. I know a lot of us continually seek to balance our outside interests and our evolving role as medical professionals. I am grateful to find a merging of my two greatest passions in the hospital, and I hope that sharing this with you will help you to see the field of Anesthesiology or whatever field you are going into, for how dynamic it is, the special way that it runs, and I hope that you can love it in the way that only you can.