Benched

While many of my peers may be finding that their white coats fit a little better after finishing the third year of medical school, I’m finding mine to hang more haphazardly on my frame. A garment that once brought me such pride when starting my medical journey is now weighed down with crumpled old copies of patient histories & physicals, snacks for when I have notes to write through lunch, and more coffee stains and pen explosions than even the most caustic of bleach pens can keep up with.

I came to medicine with the aspiration to have a meaningful career, to be there for people during difficult times, and to be continually intellectually challenged. While I think these are still valid possibilities for my eventual career, they haven’t been much a part of my third year experience. Simply due to the nature of the clerkship system, I find myself shuttling between different teams and services as frequently as every week, and have had little continuity with patients other than those I have cared for during consecutive days of a hospitalization. I know that in the future I will have my own panel of patients and be able to follow their progress along many months and years, but being constantly uprooted and placed on new teams with new personalities to adapt to and trust to earn has been less than fulfilling for me.

However, there have been some moments that reaffirmed my interest in the humanistic side of medicine, and why I came to medicine in the first place. During my acute care surgery rotation – infamous for its Q4 (every fourth night) 30-hour call – we were paged down to the emergency department’s resuscitation bay with report of an elderly woman who fell and sustained a pneumothorax (collapsed lung) while gardening. The woman spoke an uncommon dialect, and was accompanied by her teenage granddaughter as a translator. I could see the tears building in the granddaughter’s eyes as she was bombarded with questions from the trauma surgeons and ED physicians. She was being instantly thrust into the role of an adult in a high-pressure situation, and I could tell she was becoming overwhelmed. Once some of the chaos died down, I found her shivering on one of the hard benches in the resuscitation bay. I had not been allowed to assist in placing the woman’s chest tube and figured the next best thing I could do was to be there, with the young girl, in this time when she was scared and alone. We ended up deep in conversation while waiting for her uncle to arrive with more of the grandmother’s history and medications. She was a senior in high school, and was worried that her absence for the morning would not be excused, disqualifying her from graduating with honors. She would be attending college the following year, and wanted to become a veterinarian. We simply chatted, not as family member and med student, but rather just as two people, two students, who were waiting and chose to spend the time together. Eventually her uncle arrived and my team moved on, but that encounter proved to be more memorable than when I eventually helped place a chest tube or when I scrubbed in for a lap chole (Laparoscopic cholecystectomy, a procedure to remove the gallbladder). It was what I held onto for the next 28 hours, and what helped me remember why I am here. Even though I often get weighed down with negativity, and am frustrated by all the ways I am useless as a med student, moments like this one remind me that I don’t need to be the most senior member on my team to do at least some good in the world of medicine.