Stomach Whisperer
Stomach Whisperer (Montage-leaning Hybrid)
I could taste tangy cinnamon, a dash of extra vanilla, the raw flavor of molasses, all overlaid with the smooth creamy base of buttermilk batter. I’d just eaten my first bite of my grandmother’s spice cake. That night, I lay with my ear against her stomach, listening to her digestion as she told me a bedtime story. Drowsily, I wondered if the echoing gurgle I’d just heard was caused by the molasses or by the cinnamon.
In the ensuing years, I never thought too much about the days when I was the Stomach Whisperer. Cooking everything I could get a recipe for, and navigating by trial and error where no recipes were found, I took advantage of my ability to pick out ingredients in what I ate. Gradually, that early curiosity regarding the destiny of what we eat soon evolved into an intense love of science.
In high school, I fed my interest in science. Classes like Biology weren’t simply lectures designed to drill knowledge into my head; they were an experience. What I learned in science became intermingled with how I saw my environment; I could clearly picture my surroundings as the sum of billions of cells working together, or grasp how nitrogen fixation fit into the biogeochemical cycle.
But regardless of my new curiosity about science, I tended to second guess myself, especially during labs. A snarky voice inside me whispered that I couldn’t find success in science if I had no self-confidence, or if I kept questioning whether or not I was doing a lab right. Tentative goals were forming in my mind, visions of a white coat with my name embossed on it, but I told myself that becoming a doctor was a ridiculous aspiration for a cook.
Abruptly, during junior year, my beliefs about my scientific capabilities underwent a metamorphosis. I was introduced to a new type of lab: specimen dissections. Lab handouts were scarce on instructions; once we delved into the anatomy of the stomach, they became little more than pictorial references. When asked to obtain a sample of stomach epithelium, I could make a lateral incision along the pylorus of the stomach or choose to slice open the fundus along the greater curvature. I was gleefully awed. Not only was I exploring the organ that I found most interesting, but I was actually doing a good job at it. No matter which way I chose to dissect, my eyes were opened to the fact that I had the capacity to be an independent thinker, someone who didn’t necessarily need the instructions.
Armed with a newfound degree of self-assurance, I applied and was accepted to an internship at the Simi Dermatological Group. My assumption had been that when doctors see a patient, they deliberate briefly on treatment, and then prescribe whatever care is necessary. But interning showed me how very wrong I was. Patients came in daily with skin conditions that the doctors couldn’t diagnose immediately. I saw that before they prescribed treatment, stellar doctors saw patients as a mixture of physical and mental parts, not just equations to plug various medicines into.
As a matter of fact, breaking a spice cake down to ingredients, I realized, isn’t all that different from what a doctor does when diagnosing a patient. And in the future, I’ll be combining cooking and science by becoming a gastroenterologist. With a wide array of gastric disorders to treat, from gastritis to polyps, I’ll have to be self-assured, so my patients can get the best care possible. Still, each patient won’t have a recipe that I can follow to cure them, so I’ll draw on the thinking of the little girl in the kitchen, using what I know to make my own recipes. And simultaneously, I’ll always be able to incorporate the mindset of the girl wondering whether cinnamon or molasses was the cause of that gastric condition.