Jessica C. Stuart

Jessica Stuart ~

I paced in the hallway outside of the patient’s room, going over my mental checklist of items to do during the history and physical examination. Bringing in a paper list was discouraged; we were meant to “flow” through the exam “naturally.”

I stuffed my hands into the pockets of the white coat I’d received three weeks earlier, during the White Coat Ceremony for first-year medical students. Feeling around the deep pockets to make sure that I had everything I needed, I felt my left hand graze a cold metal reflex hammer with a sharp tip, used to test for nerve damage in the feet of diabetic patients. (Alternatively, it could be used as “a medieval torture device,” my mother had said the previous weekend, as I’d practiced my exam on her.) In my right pocket, I felt my tuning fork, blood-pressure cuff and ophthalmoscope.