Tag: doctor-patient relationship

One evening, at the age of four, I ran frantically into my bedroom, tears burning in my eyes, and started overturning the furniture, peering under my bed and scrabbling through piles of clothes. I bounded back downstairs into the kitchen to check the chair I’d sat in for dinner. Over and over, I asked my four siblings and my parents:

“Have you seen my blankie?”

Finally, I retraced my steps to the piano bench. There sat my blankie, a soft, bright yellow mound. I let out a sigh of relief, safe at last, and headed off to bed.

As a third-year medical student, I was two weeks into my trauma-surgery rotation when my resident casually called me “disposable.” I wasn’t offended—in fact, the word perfectly described how I’d been feeling. I also understood that it was no reflection on my performance; rather, it was a commentary on medical students in general.

Surgery was the first rotation of my third year—and, now that the COVID pandemic was winding down, it was also my first in-person clinical rotation.

I’d never been on the floors of the hospital. I felt clueless, underprepared and incompetent.

At most medical schools, the first two years are spent in lectures, labs and classroom learning. The third year is when students begin rotating on various clinical teams in the hospital and clinics, finally seeing patients as part of a large educational medical team. As I moved through pediatrics, ob/gyn, surgery and other core rotations during my third year, I took notes at the times when I felt out of place or discouraged.