Connections

I've been a bit slack with blogging through the holiday, enjoying a break from work, then coming back to a flood of phlegm!! You know how it is when you take off of work, you end up paying for it in spades.

I live in a fairly small town in a state that is not known for it's good schools. I myself was fortunate enough to grow up in areas with excellent public schools, and this was primarily due to my parents' choices of where to live; they sacrificed a lot for us to be able to go to good schools. I also enjoyed school and did pretty well.

Sadly, it seems that a lot of the high school teenagers here are not particularly ambitious and don't work very hard. For example, the first year we lived here, there was no valedictorian in the graduating class because no one had fulfilled the requirement of taking at least three honors classes in four years of school. This was stunning to hear. However, this week I had the pleasure of interacting with a junior who I could identify with a little better. She loves school, is taking the hardest classes she can possible take, and wants to go to college. She hates to miss school, and she feels stressed when she gets behind. It was just such a pleasure to chat with her about school and AP classes! When I saw her a couple of days ago, I felt like we really connected. Today, she came in to see me for some mental health issues, and she was really able to articulate her feelings, and so I felt like I could help her in a way that I can't the teens who simply grunt!

Seeing her reminded me that I do enjoy working with teenagers, I love the conversations, I like listening to their thought processes, I like hearing about their plans for the future. Sometimes I lose sight of this when I have less meaningful interactions, but I was pleasantly reminded today with my last patient of the day.