Safety for Children
“I will never let my children have sleepovers,” a mother told me firmly. I was talking to her child as my patient, and he wanted me to convince his mother otherwise.
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Kindness in the OR
Slowly, though much faster than I had anticipated, I fell into the natural rhythm of my surgery rotation as a medical student. I saw the patients in preop, greeted nurses and scrub technicians, wrote my name on the whiteboard, and helped wheel patients into the OR prior to their surgery.
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Precious Minutes
He has sharp right abdominal pain.
The pain comes and goes. It started as dull and general, but he feels it’s now concentrated on his right side. He had a similar pain a year ago, he adds. It’s worse now, so he came to the hospital.
He has a cough due to COVID.
The cough has been going on for a couple months. He had COVID in November, and it resolved. But he got COVID again in February and since then has had this lingering cough. He’s vaccinated and boosted.
Meditation in Medicine
The sun shone brightly reflecting the ripples off the pond. Closing my eyes, I tried meditation for the first time in a long time. Balancing caring for patients in the wards, being evaluated by my team, and applying for residency, I felt more stressed than I had been in a long time.
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Helplessness
As I examined the strength in my patient’s legs, I noticed some scar-like indentations on his right thigh. Pausing, I asked Rob how he’d gotten them. “I got shot,” he responded
I nodded calmly, while I summoned up Rob’s medical history. I recalled that he was on medications for PTSD. As my mind connected these dots, I asked, “What happened?”
Climate Change in Peru
A couple of summers ago, I spent ten weeks in Pullcapa, Peru. I was a mere time zone away from everything I knew; at the same time, I was in a completely different world. I worked at a grassroots nonprofit dedicated to improving the lives of the indigenous Shipibo-Conibo population. In this space, I was ready to delve into global health, improve my Spanish, and appreciate Peruvian culture through meeting people and exploring my environment.
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Delicious Cultural Lens
As a young child, I switched back and forth easily from eating with chopsticks to eating with a fork and knife. In the same vein, my palate ranged from both my favorite dish that my mom made—spicy chicken and potatoes—to a simple peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
When I entered middle school, one of the biggest changes was that our cafeteria now had microwaves. Thus instead of waiting in line and buying lunch, I could now bring in my mom’s carefully packed meals: stir-fried dishes, dumplings, even curries.
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