About Pathways

“Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a 🌸 big television, Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed- interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three piece suite on hire purchase in a range of 🌸🌸  fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing sprit- crushing game shows, stuffing 🌸🌸 junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing you last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, 🌸-up brats you have spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life... But why would I want to do a thing like that?”

― John Hodge, Trainspotting: A Screenplay

I have been somewhat busy at work recently. I know, shocking and hard to believe. And due to the nature of the project, I have also been learning an awful lot about clinical stuff. One interesting tool I kept hearing about all week last week was patient pathways. It captured my attention. If you don’t know what I am talking about; and since I now (almost, kind of) do….it is basically an operational tool for making a patient care journey as standardized as possible. 

For example, you have symptoms that point in certain direction, which requires certain type of assessment, then perhaps a few tests, then based on those you get through next steps, then maybe a scan, then something else. Sometimes somewhere nearer to the end of that pathway there is a button called “death”. Is fun. 

And for some reason, thinking about patient pathways in hospitals made me draw a mental parallel with our whole life, in general. Because in live, we, like patients broken down into particular groups, have certain pathways we are expected to follow.

I saw a cool card on Instagram recently. 

My old friend and I had a fascinating discussion the other day. Well, to be honest, this topic is one of the reoccurring ones. You see, we go way back. We were very close friends in university. Now, both of us graduated at the same time and both of us had one thing in common. We weren’t particularly passionate about our profession. That kind of sucks, if you think that you had just gone through 6 years of blood, sweat and tears to get that degree. Imagine, after all that case work and exams, after endless sleepless nights filled with cigarettes and cups of black tea, hands covered in ink, you discover that you really don’t want to do this? Well, this is where our pathways started changing one from another. I knew I didn’t want a job in my profession, so I started thinking of ways to get out of it. I took English classes, and started looking for jobs where I could build on some of the skills I got after all those years, but not be what I was released into the wild to be.

That’s where our lives took completely different turns. And this is the reality of life, isn’t it. All of us, however free we think we might be, have certain pathways written down for us the moment we are conceived. Our future is dictated to a certain degree by where we were born to start with. What sex. What culture. What religion. What set of traditions..and we can try and break the rules written for us, but it isn’t easy.

(Speaking of traditions, I have to share this card too)And so, as I talk- endlessly- with this friend about her unhappiness at the job, I often remind her that she did nothing, absolutely nothing, to change that. Surely, she gets pissed off. WTF was I supposed to do, she says. I am stuck, aren’t I. With that degree, what else could I possibly be doing? Well, I said, Makarevich became a rock star.

I remember dating someone, and one evening we were out for a romantic drink; when, suddenly, I noticed he was staring at a group in the corner of the bar. Despite his usual style, he wasn’t staring at women. He was gazing at a bunch of over-weight, big-bellied, wearing similar clothes construction workers having a pint of beer after work. Are you all right, I asked. Those aren't quite your usual types? 

Look, he said to me. That, over there, is my future. It freaks me out, he said. It terrifies and depresses me. That over there is me!But why, I asked him then. Why does it have to be you? Don’t let it become your future. 

But he was firmly set on his pathway. 

Don’t take me wrong. Pathways are not necessarily bad. In hospital, they save lives. 

I just think, when it comes to happiness, it is actually quite simple. Complex, yet simple. There is only one thing you need to do.  It is all about analyzing the pathway that was set for you, and deciding whether you- and I mean you, not your family, not your friends, not the society or Jesus- are cool with it. You are set on one, like in a hospital. But what I think is very important (and bloody difficult) is to be able to recognize the difference between being happy with the pathway you were set on and thinking that’s the pathway you should be on in order to be happy. 

You are told you belong to a certain religion, you are told you need to own a house, you are told you want children; you should have a mortgage. 90% of the girls in my university dreamed about getting married. Not stopping for a second to think whether that’s the right pathway for them personally. Is having a married status necessary for you to be happy? Does having a big family make you happy? 

And so we go on, and follow our pathway, and play our role in this movie, written for people who are just like us, and therefore, we should conform and follow. But what if?... (and isn’t that the scariest scenario of them all?) What if we follow the stupid pathway, and we tick all the boxes, and we follow all the steps…. until one day we wake up and think "Holy...🌸! I don’t want this?! I want to be a 🌸🌸🌸 pirate! I want to sail and get a parrot and rob other ships!" 

OK, OK. I know. I know robbery is naughty. But what if that is your pathway? What if robbery and a cool swearing parrot is what would make you feel alive, not a house in suburbia and a chocolate Labrador? But by then you are 80, shuffling along that boring pathway in a Zimmer frame. Well, sweetie, by then is too late. 

Choose your pathways, guys. Choose them often, and then again, and change the steps, and re-write what was written. Who knows, you might be a pirate too. Or a rock star like Makarevich.