My two younger brothers and I have had a very medicine oriented upbringing. Our father is a surgeon with a special interest, and our mother is a general practitioner. Having reached the age of 21, I thought it would be interesting to reflect on how our childhoods have been affected by our parents' profession. My brothers and I have grown up with very different career aspirations to theirs.
I first began to get an idea of what my parents' jobs involved when I was 5 years old. A local parent asked me what my mother's profession was, and I replied, very proud of my knowledge, that she was a general practitioner. Further questioning as to what this actually entailed revealed my belief that it meant she worked two days a week. I was taught some more about my mother's work that evening.
While I was always happy to discuss my mother's profession, I used to dread the question, “What does your father do?” However, with time I came to look forward to the reaction when I told the questioners that his specialty was colorectal surgery. One brother described this more graphically in his school “news book,” much to our embarrassment.
Growing up we had endless fun, but our lives have been very different to many of our friends. We did not experience what I would view as the tedium of having lived only in one place. On the contrary, moving many times has meant that I make friends readily and usually feel at ease in new situations. But by the time I was aged about 11 my youngest brother's boasting of having attended seven schools and nurseries by the age of 7 were beginning to annoy me. I was starting to think it would be nice to keep the same friends for a while and not have to change schools again. Luckily my father was soon appointed to a consultant post, and we settled down.
Figure 1.
Apart from all the moves the main differences between the non-medical children and us were nudity and Christmas. Not that they were linked. Midway through junior school my peers suddenly became very bashful about changing for sports lessons. I was unable to understand the problem and carried on being happy to undress in public for several years. Medical people are definitely a lot less inhibited than is usual. This was brought home to me recently when my boyfriend was somewhat surprised to find my mother on the landing in her underwear doing sit ups.
Our Christmases have always been somewhat unconventional. My father being on duty invariably added an element of surprise. I remember one Christmas Day spent in his on-call room in hospital eating a picnic. On a couple of occasions we accompanied my father on seasonal trips to the wards and came away very happy, as the nurses insisted that we should be rewarded for our visit with chocolate.
Having medical parents definitely has its perks, although I have only really come to appreciate these as I have matured. When we were younger it just meant that they could not be duped into letting us miss school unless we were really ill. One teacher was surprised that I had been sent to school the day after being involved in a car crash, with an eye that was so swollen I could not see out of it. Since I began university, though, it has been wonderful having someone on the end of the telephone who is used to dispensing advice, even in the middle of the night.
Recently we decided to try a little role reversal and challenged my mother to pretend to be a patient while we took turns at being the general practitioner. She was astonished that we knew all the right questions to ask. Furthermore we managed to come up with some good diagnoses and treatment plans. So are we all destined for a life of medicine then? Well, one brother is considering studying philosophy, and the other is reading computer science. As for me, I am entering my fourth year of university reading chemistry. My aim is to end up working in the scientific or medical communications industry, as I have always enjoyed writing—so funnily enough I may yet return to my medical roots.
Growing up in a medical family has been a wonderful experience, but I think we have all simply seen too much at close hand to want to commit to medicine ourselves. However, I am certainly very proud of my parents' profession—or, indeed, what is really more a way of life, and that perhaps is the problem.