What Did the Doctor Say?
Here’s what they should have told you: “We found cancer in your lymph nodes, your liver, your lungs and your brain. It explains your weight loss, your difficulty breathing and your loss of appetite. This wasn’t just your depression, like you thought. It started in your lungs, and now it’s everywhere. This cancer has been growing for quite some time. You cannot, even with the strongest medications and the longest surgeries, make this cancer disappear. It is too powerful. It is here to stay.”
They should have said, “We wish we had better news, but it looks very serious. Still, we’re here to care for you. We will not let you feel alone. Imagine the place you want to spend
Miraculous Recovery
During my third year of medical school, I completed a clinical rotation in surgery. I was certain that it would be horrible. I envisioned myself in the OR, getting lightheaded, passing out onto the sterile field and being yelled at by my attending physician. I worried that the medical knowledge I’d worked so hard to learn would be neglected in favor of memorizing the steps of surgical procedures. My parents, who are both physicians, warned that I’d just be holding retractors for hours.
I want to interact with my patients, I fretted, not just hover over them while they’re anesthetized.
Although I tried to keep an open mind, I knew that I was destined for a miserable time.
Sick of Being Sick
Ryan Nesbit ~
From second through fifth grade, I mastered the art of being sick. I got out of school, soccer practice and piano lessons so that I could be the child I wanted to be–not sick, but loved, cared for.
Here was my recipe:
1. Wake up.
2. Feel anxious about the day to come (this was natural).
3. Let the anxiety morph into a sickly pallor.
Right Coat Ceremony
Shadi Ahmadmehrabi ~
It was my first day of orientation at medical school. In a hallway stood a coat rack overflowing with white garments. I set down my accumulated papers, reached for a hanger and, for the first time ever, shrugged first one arm and then the other into a white coat.
It was too large, but I had no other options. The unisex coats ran from XXS to XXL, but the smallest had all been claimed.
As I clumsily buttoned my coat on the right (women’s coats button on the left), I couldn’t help seeing this as a physical reminder that, as my mentors had warned, medicine continues to be male-dominated, and that I’d need to pick my battles.
Scarred
Joe Burns ~
“Did you have heart surgery?”
The shy seventeen-year-old girl’s question caught me completely off guard.
Her name was Sarah. Everything about her seemed perfectly organized–her long black braid falling ruler-straight between her shoulders, her folder with all of its documents sorted by date, her matching shoes and shirt, her entire wardrobe without a single wrinkle.
Her health was a bit less perfect. She’d been born with an atrial septal defect (ASD)–a hole in the wall separating the heart’s right and left chambers. Tomorrow she was to have an operation to repair the hole, so she’d come in today, accompanied by her parents and brother, to sign the presurgical consent forms.
Why Aren’t You Depressed?
Tess Timmes ~
“Please walk slowly,” cautioned Sunita, my interpreter, as I crept down the stony switchback trail towards the rural Nepali village of Dhulikhel. Sunita, in her petite navy ballet flats, hopped down the rocks as easily as the speckled goats grazing nearby.
Emboldened by her speed, I stepped along eagerly, only to catch my size-ten neon running sneaker on a root and splat face-first into the dust. Looking up, I saw four women standing outside their clay-walled homes, their hands pressed to their mouths, their eyes sparkling with stifled laughter. Talk about making an entrance….
After finishing my third year of medical school, I was taking a year off to pursue my masters degree in public health. Through my research
Cat and Mouse
Kristen Lee ~
On TV shows, therapists decorate their rooms with leather lounge chairs, throw pillows and organza curtains that let in the light.
But Dr. Hassan’s office is in the clinic basement. The fluorescent lighting is sterile. She has a gray metal desk–I think every doctor I’ve shadowed as a medical student has had that same desk.
But I’m not here as a student.
I’ve been anticipating this appointment for a month. In March, I started to take an online physiology exam for school, but instead spent twenty minutes staring motionless at the computer screen. I eventually input the answers and passed the test, but I’d stopped caring.
A week later, I had a panic attack while riding the
My First Code
Jessica Greenberg ~
“Code Blue, Interventional Radiology suite,” blare the overhead speakers.
I am a new third-year medical student, doing my first rotation in internal medicine at Yale New Haven Hospital. This morning, I’ve been rounding on patients with my medical team.
The alarm sends us lumbering down the halls, struggling to keep our clogs from falling off our feet, clutching our white jackets to our chests to keep the pockets full of stethoscopes and pens and patient lists from bouncing.
Arriving in the IR suite, I stop about twenty feet from the middle-aged woman lying in the patient bed. More than a dozen physicians and nurses crowd around her, obscuring my view.
Life or Death
It was election night. November 8, 2016. As a southern, affluent, white male from a conservative household I leveled with her: “This election isn’t life or death.”
