Everyone Has a Timetable of Their Own

It has already been seven years since I graduated from medical school. Seven years is by no means a short time, and yet it slipped by in the blink of an eye. Feeling that time runs ever faster is probably proof that I’m getting older. To be fair, a lot happened during that stretch, so I can’t simply call it a short spell.

Most of all, there was a year of rest. As a child I was hospitalized several times and often missed school, but that wasn’t by my own free will. And whenever I came back, I had to catch up on what I’d fallen behind on. The many absences of that period later hardened into a kind of urgency that I must never step out of whatever group I belonged to. That urgency drove me to work incessantly so I wouldn’t be different from others.

By contrast, the year of rest after graduation was entirely my voluntary choice. I chose, of my own decision, a path that would make me later than others. After passing through that time, I finally realized that slipping out of the ranks of the world isn’t as frightening as I’d imagined. Everyone has a timetable for life, so there was no need to fret, in comparison with others, over why I seemed to be lagging behind. That was the unexpected insight that year of rest gave me.

After that year I applied for an internship at the hospital where I’d received treatment since childhood. I earnestly hoped to be accepted, but things didn’t go my way. Next I decided to study drugs and entered graduate school. But what I actually experienced there was very different from what I’d expected. Papers were the beginning and the end of the work, and the papers written in my lab felt less for patients than for the professors who put their names on them. Even so, I didn’t have the courage to walk out right away. I drifted for three years, and only then did I finally leave graduate school. I can smile about it now, but it was a period when nothing seemed to go right.

That time, however, wasn’t entirely meaningless. I discovered a new path I hadn’t anticipated. It was a comprehensive, organic system by which patients could receive help from doctors anytime and anywhere—what’s now called telemedicine. To me, telemedicine wasn’t merely a new form of medical service. If medicine is about healing the sick, then in letting patients receive care comfortably without the constraints of time and place, telemedicine is the technology most faithful to the essence of medicine.

Back then, though, it remained at the level of a concept; it hadn’t yet shown itself to the world. If someone was going to start building telemedicine, I wanted, however modestly, to help along that path.

So I did what I could. I started a company to connect patients and doctors over the internet. As people around me began using smartphones, one by one, I lost no time in linking patients and doctors through those phones. Anyone with a question about their body could use the device in their hand to ask a nearby doctor and get an answer.

As time passed, however, things drifted in a direction a bit different from what I’d first imagined. The doctors and patients I was connecting were talking mainly about cosmetic procedures—the so-called “money-making” lines of care. The company made money, but I didn’t enjoy it. It was work that didn’t really require a doctor.

Meanwhile, when I met up with classmates from my year, they were on the clinical front lines, meeting the sick and giving them real help. It was the starkest contrast to me. I wasn’t contributing to saving anyone. I wasn’t doing the work of saving people; I was circling in a peripheral realm.

That didn’t mean the idea of connecting patients and doctors remotely was wrong. It was simply that my capabilities weren’t yet enough to do it. I looked at what I lacked. Two things stood out: “clinical experience” and a “systematic organization.” So I decided I needed to actually see patients to gain clinical experience. That’s why I resolved, though a bit late in age, to begin hospital training.

At thirty-three I applied for an intern physician position at a public hospital in Seoul. As a side note, I didn’t even tell my parents I was applying. Of course, once you’re past thirty, reporting every job decision to your parents would be silly. But at the time I was unmarried and living with them, so telling them wouldn’t have been strange either. I kept quiet because, if I failed, I thought I’d be terribly embarrassed—even in front of my own family.

The competition was fierce, but fortunately I received an acceptance notice. With acceptance came a fresh worry: my age. I’d braced for it from the start, but as I headed toward my mid-thirties I wondered if I’d be too old among the interns. Typically, you enter medical school at twenty, graduate in six years, and become a doctor at twenty-six. Even for men who serve in the military, most begin training before thirty. By my age—thirty-three—many have already become specialists.

A memory from my student days surfaced. There was a senior in our classroom about five years older than my cohort, who had continued without a break since admission. My classmates tried to treat him with respect and make room for him in our circle, and he, for his part, clearly tried to get along with us. But as time passed he floated among us like oil in water. It may be a stretch to compare school with the workplace, but even so, I secretly worried that to the classmates starting internship with me I’d look like that senior.

Later, at the intern orientation, I learned something that swept away my worries. The average age of the twenty-two new interns, including me, was exactly thirty-three. The human heart is fickle: once I knew that, I felt at ease. Nothing had actually changed, of course. But confirming that I wasn’t conspicuously old among the group lightened my mood.

There were even a couple of interns in their forties. Others were younger than I but still starting internship later than usual. I’d thought I’d come to it after many twists and turns, but perhaps it didn’t look that way to others. Just as I looked at an intern older than me and simply thought, “So that’s how it is,” others probably didn’t see me as anything special either.

Standing in the position of watching interns older than myself, I was reminded of a plain fact: people don’t concern themselves much with other people’s lives. As long as I wasn’t harming anyone, there was no reason to obsess over how I appeared. That’s all the more true of growing older—something everyone goes through. Even if someone does pay attention, that happens in their head; whether I let it affect me is entirely up to me.

In some ways it’s like an ID photo. People don’t scrutinize others’ ID photos to see whether they came out well. I’m the only one who notices that my two eyes look slightly different in size. And yet if I really dislike my ID photo, then I should retake it. I can’t use someone else’s as if it were mine. That’s why it’s meaningless to lay someone else’s timetable over my life.

Everyone has a timetable for life. There’s no reason to compare, and you can’t. There’s no need to fret because you’re late, or preen because you’re early. In my twenties I became a doctor and a graduate student. In my thirties I became the CEO of a startup with twelve employees. Next I was about to step into life as an intern—the lowest rung in the hospital.

At each stage of life I was aware of where someone I knew might be by then. Then, when I entered internship later than usual—or so I thought—I found people older than me sitting beside me. Only then did I grasp how futile those comparisons of life’s timetables were. At thirty-three, beginning internship at a public hospital in Seoul, I was writing the one and only timetable of my own life.