It's Official

I am now "Dr Ben Kumor, MD." Weird. Ask the 10-years-ago me or any of my family if they ever saw this coming in a million years. I mean, I used to hate school, love sleep, and was terribly lazy. Some things never change, but at least now I'm done with school! My style has been severely cramped in the sleep and laziness departments, though, and it doesn't look like that's changing any time soon.

At any rate, a full 20 years of school (21 if you count kindergarten) has culminated in a pretty cool degree. The hooding ceremony was nice, and some folks even came out to see it. Stephanie and Caleb were there, of course, with some of our good friends from our time in Ohio: Paul and Sheila Majewski and James Lee. Stephanie's folks and her brother David were there as well, and I have always appreciated the way her family makes occasions like this a big priority. My family was represented by my oldest brother Brent, who was a real trooper and drove the 13+ hours all the way from Nebraska in the middle of the week. Like I said, the ceremony was nice. We all had our names read as "Dr So and So" for the first time, got our hood (a goofy piece of academic regalia worn around your neck and down your back), and recited a cleaned up version of the Hippocratic Oath - no swearing by Apollo, no promising to educate other doctors' kids for free, no forbidding surgery or abortions - along with an oath some members of the class came up with basically promising to do right by our patients and be good doctors.

Do I feel any different now? Nope. Should I? I hope not! Maybe it's the 3 years of training I still have left, or that I didn't really pour my heart and soul into med school like some of my classmates, or because I haven't dreamed of being a doc my whole life, but whatever the reason it seems a little anticlimactic.

I think one reason might be a post PNG hangover. I finally got to see there what I got into medicine for. It wasn't a bunch of rich people looking for a pill to make them skinny and happy and full of energy. It wasn't doing every test remotely related to what is going on so you don't get your butt sued. And it wasn't even doing a darn good job practicing medicine to get a nice paycheck and help a few people along the way. Medicine at Kudjip Nazarene Hospital is all about doing a ton with very little to help out needy, hurting, sick people and pointing them to the Lord while you do it. What more could a young, not-yet-jaded doctor want? If you asked my fellow classmates, I think you'd get a lot of different answers. I guess I'm just not looking forward to American medicine again. I've got a ton to learn, though, and this is the best place in the world to learn it. I just hope I can stay objective and do a good job of picking out the good and the bad of how things are done.

Where am I going with all this? I guess I am reminded during this graduation time that life really is a continuous process. Even though there are these milestones along the way, there's still a lot of work to be done in every aspect of my life before I can look at myself and be satisfied with what I see. So, even though this is a big milestone, what I really need to do is get back to the work of serving and growing so I can be prepared to serve better.