I spent my first two years of medical school collecting stories. I journaled about my thoughts in the anatomy lab. I wrote about what it was like to learn how to interview and examine patients, about the immense honor and privilege I felt just being able to don a white coat with a stethoscope around my neck. I wrote about the patients that touched my heart – the patient with Huntington’s Disease that reframed my perspective on death, the teenager with an undiagnosed neurodegenerative disorder that reminded me of my privilege, the elderly woman with a lymphoma that showed me the knowledge I was gaining was meaningful.
Since I spent most of these first two years studying from a textbook, I craved these stories. Each time I collected one, I tucked it away and protected it with every fiber of my still-pristine white coat, wrapped snugly around my body. It was easy to tell these stories. Each one felt so important, like an opportunity for self-discovery and personal improvement. And there was ample time and space to learn and grow.
I entered my clinical rotations of third year with excitement and eagerness about all the stories I was going to gather. After years spent listening to lectures and seven weeks spent studying 12 to 14 hours a day for USMLE STEP 1, I had finally made it to the “good part.” When I walked into my first day of my neurology rotation, still wearing a pristine white coat, I was ready.
But somehow, the stories are hard to tell now. They are vast and messy and tangled and numerous and all-encompassing – and when I sit down to write, the only thought that keeps flashing through my mind is which story do I tell first? Do I write about the stroke patient who reminded me of my grandmother? Or the immigrant child with cerebral palsy who cannot receive her spinal surgery because of a lack of health insurance? Or the mother of two young children who was just diagnosed with an incurable neurodegenerative disease? Or the man suffering from delirium whose belligerence drove his wife to tears? Or the patient who throws himself onto the floor with the hopes of sustaining a head injury that will allow him to “escape” to the hospital?
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