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An Ounce of Empathy
I am a medical student in my third year of studies. For medical students, this is the point at which, after two years of book learning, we rotate through hospital clerkships that give us our first experience of delivering hands-on care to inpatients.
Earlier in the year (it feels like many lifetimes ago), I read that COVID-19 was “just the flu.” We heard from scientific sources and popular media that other maladies were much worse, and that it would be a mistake to overreact to this one. Like many people, I accepted these assurances without too much concern. It all seemed a bit remote to me–the way I imagine issues like food stamps may seem to a politician who’s never needed them.
But now
Sweet Child of Mine
Unmute
Vision Quest
After finishing my third-year clinical rotations in medical school, I was feeling sleep-deprived and stressed out. The problem, I finally realized, was the ridiculous amount of pressure I’d put on myself to impress my attending physicians and get good grades.
My father is an ophthalmologist and cornea/cataract specialist. After routinely rejecting his career advice throughout my undergraduate years, I’d entered medical school–and, to my father’s delight, found myself increasingly fascinated by his field.
A COVID State of Mind
I’m a fourth-year psychiatry resident in the final months of training, and I have signed on to continue as an attending physician at my hospital.
In mid-March, my team was consulted on a patient in the ICU. She was one of the first identified COVID-19 cases in Michigan, and our hospital’s first such patient.
Love in the Time of COVID-19
COVID-19 changes everything–even, or especially, love. It demands that we love differently, and in new ways. For me, this is what #loveinthetimeofcovid19 looks like.
My husband, Lunan, and I are both doctors. Lunan, a urologist, is completing his final year of training in New York City, and I am a family-physician educator at a medical school in Miami.
We are living separately this year–one of the many sacrifices we’ve made in pursuing our medical training over the past twelve years. Since August, he and I been traveling back and forth to see each other two or three times per month. Now we’re not sure when we’ll be together again–and for us, that has been the most painful and personal part of the daily reality of
Not What I Expected
As I struggled my way through nursing school, I never expected my first job as a nurse to feel like this; I was too busy dreaming of the day when I could hold the title of Registered Nurse.
I never expected to come home crying. I never expected that, at times, I’d mumble the words “I hate my job.” I never expected many of the challenges I face daily–but here I am, six weeks into my first hospital job, fighting to make it. Here I am, figuring out what it means to be a nurse, learning what to expect.
It is early afternoon, and I have just finished administering my last midday medication. I emerge from the patient’s room to find that five call
Put to the Test
