Life Granted My Wishes. Just Not the Way I Expected.

Notes from the other side of the consultation table

Strange but true.

Right now, I am living through one of the strangest phases of my life.

For years, I wished for a break from medicine. I wanted to step away from hospital corridors, travel, write, learn, breathe, and discover who I was outside my profession.

I got my wish. With one small caveat.

I can’t travel. I can’t wander. I can’t even disappear into books for long. Instead, I am caring for my sick mother.

Medicine, I had left. But the clinic smartly moved home.

One night the pharmacist had changed the brand without telling us. I sat on the edge of her bed with the old strip in one hand and the new one in the other, matching the milligrams under the phone’s flashlight until I was sure. She was already asleep. I wasn’t.

Me-created using chatgpt

I always wanted to write about my patients — the fear on a face before test results, the small negotiations of hope and honesty.

I do write now. Just not that.

I write down her medicines, and the times to take them. I write down appointments, and what to ask at each one. I write down what she’s eaten, what she hasn’t, how far she walked today. Life quietly moved me to the other side of the consultation table, and gave me a different notebook.

Now I am the one asking the questions.

I am the one waiting outside the door.

I am the one googling every drug at midnight, double-checking the strip in my hand against the prescription — because being a doctor doesn’t make you calmer when it’s your own mother. If anything, it makes you more afraid. You know exactly what can go wrong.

It is an education no medical college teaches.

Then came another contradiction, quieter but just as strange.

I had also told myself I wanted to become free of desires. To want less. To need less. To simply be content.

Yet when I honestly look at my wish list, it is filled with desires. Travel. Writing. Learning. A new career. Financial security. Peace.

Apparently, becoming desireless was itself another desire. How does one make sense of that?

I don’t think I fully can. But sitting here — literally, in a chair beside my mother, most evenings — I notice something.

I wanted freedom. Life gave me responsibility. I wanted to write about patients. Life made me experience what it means to care for one. I wanted to be desireless. Life showed me exactly how attached I still am — to her recovery, to normal reports, to ordinary days.

Life isn’t denying my desires. It’s refining them. Desire gives you somewhere to walk toward. Patience is what lets you actually get there without breaking.

Maybe growing up — spiritually or otherwise — isn’t about wanting less. It’s about becoming bigger than the wanting. Strong enough to chase it when the time is right. Steady enough to sit still when it isn’t.

Desire still wants to run.

For now, I’m here, in this chair, and life is asking me to stay.

Perhaps that, too, is taking me exactly where I need to go.

Thanks for reading.