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A Reason to Stay

Ashish Massey February 22, 2013 No Comments

Ashish Massey

“Aren’t those decorations looking nice?” asks a soft voice beside me.

Startled, I turn to find a young woman wearing a red-and-white sari. Her head and face are swathed in the folds of the sari, leaving only the large red bindi on her forehead clearly visible.

We’re sitting on a grassy tuft amid a large campus green. All about us stand buildings with signs in both Hindi and English. Atop the central building waves an Indian flag, around which workers are hanging colorful garlands, tassels and lights.

“It looks very nice. What is it for?” I reply in Hindi, feeling that my accent must betray my American upbringing.

I am a fourth-year medical student. Two days ago

Florence

Ben White February 1, 2013 No Comments

Ben White

When I first met Florence in the ER, she’d already been dying for some time.

I was a third-year medical student doing my internal-medicine clerkship. Florence was a soft-spoken, tired woman in her sixties. To her, I was yet another face asking all the same questions, but she didn’t mind telling her story again–although she did stop in the middle to tell me, “You have beautiful eyes.” I paused to smile, then continued taking my history.

Florence was very overweight, diabetic, a mother to children who were somewhere far away, and a wife to a quiet, slender man with bags under his eyes. She and her husband

Hurricane Sandy: Two Tales of One City

Paul Lapis November 9, 2012 No Comments

Editor’s Note: Hurricane Sandy hit New York, Pulse‘s home, on Monday, October 29. Eleven days later, many parts of our area are still limping toward recovery. Today we bring you two stories, rather than the usual one, about the hurricane’s impact. The first is by a medical student who was suddenly thrust closer to his newly adopted city. The second is an e-mail written to a colleague by a family physician who volunteered time in a City shelter.

New York Welcomes You

Paul Lapis

Just three short months ago, I took my first steps into the medical world when I put on my white coat and began my first day as a student

Emergency Landing

Shumon Dhar October 5, 2012 No Comments

Shumon Dhar

In the summer of my first year of college, I did an internship as a nursing attendant in a rehab hospital’s stroke unit.

As a premed student, I had little idea of what it meant to be a physician. But that didn’t stop me from feeling slightly superior to others who weren’t on the same path. Although I didn’t know how to take someone’s blood pressure, I often treated friends to detailed descriptions of the biochemistry of complex metabolic diseases.

My summer job took me totally out of this academic comfort zone.

I found myself washing, dressing and caring for the most debilitated people imaginable–unable to walk

Epiphany

George Saj April 20, 2012 No Comments

George Saj

It happened one wintry night in 1965. I was in my third year of medical school during a rotation on the pulmonary service.

My supervising intern had been busy all evening admitting a dozen people in various stages of respiratory distress; they were suffering from ailments ranging from flu to double pneumonia.

It was my job to collect each patient’s sputum and culture it on a Petri dish, which would take several days to grow out. I also prepared stained slides of each sample. We did this in hopes of being able to visually identify the offending bacteria, so that we could speedily administer the appropriate antibiotic.

This was painstaking work: the intern and I had to repeatedly re-check

Out of This World

Katelyn Mohrbacher March 30, 2012 No Comments

Katelyn Mohrbacher

When I met Jasper, I was a third-year medical student doing a nine-month rural clerkship, and he was an eighty-year-old man in a coma.

Family members surrounded Jasper–a tall, broad-shouldered man–as he lay in the hospital bed. His wife, Esther, a petite, lively woman also in her eighties, stood by his head, grasping the bed rail. At the foot of the bed stood their son, a middle-aged man with a baseball cap on his head, his hands fisted in his pockets. Flanking the bed were his sisters (both nurses), one with curly hair and a baggy sweatshirt, the other slim and well-groomed. A warm summer breeze wafted through the room, bringing the scent of fresh-cut grass.

Jasper had been admitted two days

Common Thread

Peter de Schweinitz March 9, 2012 No Comments

Peter de Schweinitz

One sunny afternoon during my fourth year of medical school, I spent a day assisting a New Yorker turned rural Southern podiatrist. As we whittled dead skin, checked pulses and scheduled minor procedures, an arrogant question formed in my mind: Why did you choose the feet instead of something more impressive, like the heart?

Maybe he read my mind. Later, seeing me off to my car, he said, “I know that you medical doctors could do my job. I’m here so that you can do more important things.”

At the time, I didn’t know whether to pity his lack of aspiration or admire his humility. But a

Cracking the Code

Zohar Lederman November 25, 2011 No Comments

Zohar Lederman

I am a medical student in Pavia, Italy, doing my fifth year out of six. It is summertime, and, as I’ve done every summer for years, I’ve returned to my small hometown in the south of Israel. There, among other things, I volunteer as an emergency medical technician (EMT) with Magen David Adom, the Israeli Red Cross.

It’s 7:30 on a Friday morning. I’m at the Red Cross office, talking with the paramedic and a doctor, when a young volunteer runs in.

“There’s a car pulling up outside–they’re bringing an unconscious patient!” he says.

The paramedic goes to get the advanced life support equipment, and the doctor

First, Do No Harm

Alison Block November 3, 2011 3 Comments

Alison Block

It’s one of my earliest memories: I’m wrestling with my brother, and I’m losing, because I’m five and he’s seven, and he’s bigger and stronger than I am. So I bite him, hard.

Instantly I know I’ve crossed some sort of line, and I employ my most primitive defense mechanism, shouting out, “He bit me! Jon bit me!” I feel shame, because I am old enough to know it is wrong to hurt people–and to lie.

Some years later, I am accepted to medical school. I go to the first ceremony of my medical career–the one where I get my short white coat–and I take a modernized version of the Hippocratic Oath. I will try to do the best I can for my

Awakening

Benjamin Ostro September 2, 2011 No Comments

Benjamin Ostro with Boris D Veysman

Back when I was a premedical student, I didn’t devote much time to community service. I cared about helping others, and yet, feeling as driven as I did to excel in my academic and extracurricular commitments, I had little time for volunteering.

It’s been my sense that most physicians don’t do much community service. If you ask a doctor why this is so, he or she might shrug and say something like “My work benefits the community” or “I’m already overworked.”

Upon entering medical school, I absorbed this attitude more or less unconsciously. I viewed volunteer work as “rewarding,” but devoid of any

Conundrum

Matthew Hirschtritt July 22, 2011 No Comments

Matthew Hirschtritt

Walking from an exam room to the nurse’s station in the small outpatient clinic where I worked as a second-year medical student, I paused by a window to gaze out at the winter sunset. After a moment, I looked down to scan the notebook where I kept my schedule and notes for my last patient of the day.

4:15, Ms. Smith, 26, lump on groin–the bare bones of a story waiting to be filled in.

Feeling tired and looking forward to dinner, I sighed dramatically, dropped into a chair in front of a computer console and called up Ms. Smith’s electronic health record.

Like most medical records,

On the Bottom Rung

Jordanna Platt July 1, 2011 No Comments

I was in my third year of medical school, and the initial week of my first-ever hospital clerkship had passed without incident. I showed up on time, did what I was told, stepped on no toes and followed my patients as well as I could.

At the close of that week, however, my intern pulled me aside to ask, “Remember learning how to put an IV in a mannequin during the workshop earlier today? Well, there’s a patient in radiology, waiting for a CT scan. The tech can’t flush the IV, and I need you to do it. If you can’t, put in a new one.”

Tech? Flush? I meditated on my intern’s words and realized that this would be my first unsupervised procedure.

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

Tag: medical student stories

A Reason to Stay

Florence

Hurricane Sandy: Two Tales of One City

Emergency Landing

Epiphany

Out of This World

Common Thread

Cracking the Code

First, Do No Harm

Awakening

Conundrum

On the Bottom Rung

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fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

Tag: medical student stories

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