This summer, to decide whether I should really take the extra time and effort to be pre-med, I am volunteering at the hospital. My first couple of weeks have been particularly surreal. From the initiation, where I talked to a fellow who spoke ill of the hospital we were volunteering for and explained that they stick the volunteers in a closet to file papers, to the next week where I was hiding in the corner of a big white room filled with a few doctors and a whole hell of a lot of nurses praying that I don’t faint at the sight of blood.

To say the least, I wasn’t filing papers. Though, I didn’t see much. I could see a bit of skull sticking out of his head, and contusions on his face. I could definitely hear him screaming expletives as the nurses pulled his mangled body into a recognizable human position. I told myself I could hide behind the curtain if I got too scared and felt like I was going to faint, but I didn’t.

I do believe that it is necessary to look straight into the horrors of life in order to become a better person. Whether or not I want to be a doctor, I keep telling myself, it is a good experience to have.

I was late getting home. I rode home on my bicycle, shaky, but alert, and sat down in my chair to play some World of Warcraft.

The first thing I thought was that it was ironic that I decided to play a video game to escape violence and fear of death, but honestly I couldn’t find anything more fitting. In World of Warcraft, you are in a world which is free of death (at least death is very temporary, and as such not really death), and even pain is a bandage away from perfect health. As many kodos might barrel over my tiny, undead body, I am never smushed or hurt. I never end up in a level 1 trauma center.

Granted, Grand Theft Auto, or (lest I sound old) Carmageddon *might* have been a little more harrowing (yes, said trauma described above was a car accident), but the idea is the same. Video games are not about death and violence, because there isn’t any, really. And while I might be completely not accustomed to pain and death in real life, I am plenty desensitized to video game violence.

I really wonder what the video-game-playing members of the US Armed Forces think about all of this, especially since the horror of medicine is nothing compared to the horror of war.