Like this:

This is has been one long, painful week.  I have been having trouble sleeping lately, so I’m getting maybe 2-3 hours of actual sleep in a night and coffee is the only thing keeping me going throughout each day.  But a lot of work has gotten done.  The salon is looking beautiful. Noah and Graham built a few extra cabinets that give us a lot of extra storage room (very important on a boat) and make the entire room look more like a place we will be living.  The hard rail around the boat is almost done, and the rub rail is fully installed.  For me it was exciting to see our solar panels arrive.  I have been working for weeks on getting us 6 solar panels but apparently there was a miscommunication between my contact (a guy who owns a solar panel store here in palm coast) and his supplier in Texas, so we only ended up with two.  it took hours to figure out what happened, but in the end we got what we were supposed to on their end but they are both going to look for additional panels for us, so we will see how that goes.  I am done with everything can do electrically until the rest of the supplies we ordered arrive.  Also one of our spreader lights didn’t work when I put them up, so I had to redo that, but it looks great now. It is truly amazing to see the boat lit up at night now, the entire deck just comes alive and it really feels like I could be on it for a year now.  I find myself imagining what I will be seeing for the first time in what seems like weeks.  Work has been so crazy here that I have barely had time to breathe, but less than that is think about the future (and the only thing I force myself to think about when it comes to that is med school apps).  Speaking of which med school apps are pretty much done. I am not counting on hearing anything back from the rest of UC med schools so all my others are completed and done, what a relief that is.  Applying to 29 schools, rejected from 6, at least I still 23 left to hear from. I never knew how much these apps would take out of me.  All the time and energy of writing them, and then the emotional energy of trying to give us with each rejection (which by the way are the nicest go to hell letters I have ever gotten).  But I guess medical school is going to be like most other things in my life, I never really seem to take the easiest or common path. I often find the other ways of doing things or finding my place.  Maybe the medical school thing will solve itself, and all I need to do is keep working.  While it has gotten me into some trouble and times haven’t always been easy, because of this I have gotten to experience and learn more than many people twice my age, and look where I am now. About to sail around the world, going to help people. It is truly amazing.

The wife of Ben and Sky’s cousin, and one of my best friends from high school, is out here helping us do some filming and some web work for two weeks.  She filmed an interview with me last night, and afterward we were talking about motivations to come out and do something like this.  Whenever people ask me that I always say that I’m going to help people, and that is true, but of course it’s not the entire story. Everyone has something that they want to gain from this, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot.  I have heard the motivations from the rest of the crew, so I thought it would be a good idea to write mine down and see if they change once we are underway.  so my motivations: of course to help people, learn how to be a better doctor, sail around the world, be an instrument of change, help get into medical school, become more globally aware, learn lessons I never knew I never knew, and help others do the same.  Some of these are selfish and some are selfless, and still others are somewhere in between, but they are the truth.  Of course I would love it if this helped me get into medical school, but it is also so much more than that.  Doing something like this has to be something in the middle I think.  It is recognizing the true motivations, and pursue all of them with all your heart, just focusing more on the selfless side than anything else.  It is the only way it will work.  But as time goes by I think the motivations I have will change as soon as we run that first clinic.

I guess the only thing I know for sure is that things are changing every day.  The boat is changing, and I hope I am with it.  The next year will bring lessons, challenges, and changes that I have not yet even dreamed.

 

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