The story hunter

I woke up today felling a little awkward. I wasn’t missing my family as usual, or the beautiful house I left in Brazil, nor my grandma’s delicious food. I was missing a part of me, a big part of me that stayed when I came. I missed who I was in my profession.

When we decided to come to Italy, I knew that for a while I would have to give up my profession. After all, medicine is one of the most regulated professions in the world and no wonder - serious countries protect their own population from bad doctors. But the fact that I knew in advance that I would have to be "on hold" for a while doesn’t make that wait any less painful.

Unlike so many colleagues, I knew from the very beginning of my life what the profession was like. I knew what was like to spend the afternoon in the emergency waiting room while my mother was on duty. I knew what was like to look for my father in the audience of my first communion while he had to operate a very ill patient. I knew my aunt's expression when she would left a family meeting to assist a birth. If anyone in the world does medicine for the glam, surely that person is not me.

From an early age, I was interested in the history of people. I was talkative and loved meeting new people. I remember looking at the small windows of huge buildings and imagining what the life of those people in there was like, what their stories were, their dreams. And it was thus, out of pure curiosity and thirst to know more about people, that I ended up being a doctor. Of course, coupled with the fact that I aways felt at home whenever I would be in a hospital.

That’s how an anxious 19 year old girl entered her first college class at the Federal University of Santa Catarina on September 11, 2006. The future was all mine! I had secured my perfect profession at the perfect university (where my whole family had studied, beside my home, and especially where my mother had worked as a nurse since my childhood).

For six years, I learned about lungs and intestines, viruses and bacteria, all kinds of diseases and all kinds of cures. My favorite moments were those at the edge of a patient's bed, where I could talk and get to know more about that individual and his story. It was the fisherman who did not feed until I found out that he only ate fish, it was the woman with cervical cancer who had never gone to the gynecologist in her life because she felt ashamed, the child under chemotherapy who caressed my hair for not having her own.

Medicine is my profession and my amusement park. It's a big part of my heart and my soul. How do I handle being away for so much?

I've been in Italy for exactly 18 months. Six months ago, I sent all the documents to the Ministry of Health in Rome to be analyzed (for those who want to know what these documents are, here is the link). I'm still waiting for their response and every day is a new challenge. My profession sometimes seems distant enough to be considered another life.

But love is still greater and I am sure that my long years of training as a doctor and then as a surgeon will never be in vain. If these years have served to make me a bit more empathic and more generous about the pain of the others, it is enough to make me a better person, willing to make things (in or out of my profession) work.

Currently, I work as a volunteer at an non-profitable organization that aims to integrate immigrants of various nationalities into Italian culture. You can not imagine how many stories I've heard! How I was received with affection by people who do not speak with their mouths but with the voice of their hearts. In the end, I found a place where I could be a "story hunter" and still help others. Today I fell cured every day by the contagious energy of people who left everything behind to survive or to give a decent life to their children.

Although I still want to go back to my profession, I'm happy today with everything life has given me so far.