“You’re going to fall in love with her,” the nurse warned me, as I stood outside my eleven-year-old patient’s room ready to wake her up for surgery pre-rounds at 5:30 a.m. I offered back a tired smile and knocked on the door timidly. “Naomi?” I whisper…
“You’re going to fall in love with her,” the nurse warned me, as I stood outside my eleven-year-old patient’s room ready to wake her up for surgery pre-rounds at 5:30 a.m. I offered back a tired smile and knocked on the door timidly. “Naomi?” I whisper…
We recently had a patient who arrived on our service in the intensive care unit after a complicated surgery. The surgery left him close to dying, and he was immediately put on life support and given heavy sedatives. Ventilators breathed for him. Specia…
I just had a conversation with a physician and faculty member at my school. He started the conversation like this: “It’s alright if you disagree with me, and I can disagree with you too. Good academic discourse should allow people to disagree with each…
Our country is at risk of losing an iconic institution that has played a pivotal role in the history of medical education. A school, which has produced some of the boldest pioneers in medicine, could lose accreditation upon the opening of a new hospita…
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 …
After my surgery rotation, I was in a very bad place. I felt like two months of grueling work hours and relentless studying were wiped away in an instant by a bad test score. That single number somehow mattered more to me than every positive comment I …
“A moment’s insight is sometimes worth a life’s experience.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. Several years ago, an anxious senior medical student was preparing his application for The Match, the clearinghouse through which 37,000 candidates ho…
Two weeks ago, while I was helping with an emergency medicine course that I’m a teaching assistant for, I started feeling extremely light-headed, and the chest tightness that I had dismissed as heartburn earlier that morning got worse. I was tended to …
“Where there is no struggle, there is no compassion.” -Frederick Douglass Growing up with sickle cell anemia exposed me to the field of medicine. As I go through the pain and complications, it humbles me to the point that motivates me to work harder to…
