Addressing the futility of modern medicine
Initially, medical school is hard in two different ways. In the basic science courses, you're afraid of failure: you can't cram all the symptoms and invisible signs into your brain fast enough. Then, in the clinical courses, you're afraid of shame: you'd think that navigating a conversation around awkward topics like your patient's bowel movements, their sex life, and their drug use would be the biggest challenge.
But then you enter the clinic, and you encounter a patient whose medical and surgical history is longer than your arm, and you wonder how anyone could be so unlucky. And today, her chief complaint is the fact that she is some kind of intolerable pain. You realize that pain is not a completely invisible sign because it's written all over her face. You learn about her family and become her friend, and talk about the life that her illness stole.
You learn that her disease is incurable. Yet, she tells you she has hope, because she believes in balance. So, logically: since there is some Evil in this universe that made her ill, there must be some Good that will make her better. That's what keeps her going.
You want to believe that this is the part where you do the "doctor thing," where you give the right drug, run the right test, or say the right words to make things... better. But you're a medical student, which means you're not the right kind of Good, or maybe just not yet good enough. Maybe no one is. You know that with time you'll outgrow the awkward moments, and experience tells you that a fear of failure is cured with hard work, but the sense of futility is new and a bit harder to manage.
I think, over several years, I realized that it isn't really our job to fix people. If you enter medicine with that in mind you will drive yourself insane. You will fail most of the time. We can't fix people, ultimately. But we can provide comfort, and care, and dignity to the sick.