A medical student volunteers with the medical corps [PODCAST]

Listen and followApple PodcastsSpotifyYouTubeMore apps · Browse all episodes

“An email arrived inviting med students to join the State of Georgia’s Medical Reserve Corps (MRC). The MRC is an organization of doctors, nurses, PAs, EMTs, and med students who are the first medical boots on the ground for disasters in Georgia. They establish mobile hospitals and provide medical care. With extra time in isolation, I signed up and shortly received a notice for locations at food banks available to students. I requested an assignment, received my orders, and deployed the next day to serve for two weeks.

When I arrived, the food bank was in desperate need of volunteers. With the state shutdown, more people needed food, but fewer people were able to help. The Georgia State Defense Force (GSDF), a statewide Army branch of volunteers, assigned soldiers to work at the food banks since normal volunteers were under lockdown. I was assigned as medical support for the soldiers.”

Mason Bennett is a medical student.

He shares his story and discusses his KevinMD article, “A medical student’s unique education in a pandemic.”

This episode is sponsored by The Nuance Dragon Ambient eXperience (DAX). The Nuance DAX solution makes it possible to forget the tech-toggling and reduces documentation burdens no matter how or where care is being provided.

Did you enjoy today’s episode?

Please click here to leave a review for The Podcast by KevinMD. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app to get notified when a new episode comes out!

Do you know someone who might enjoy this episode? Share this episode to anyone who wants to hear health care stories filled with information, insight, and inspiration.

Hosted by Kevin Pho, MD, The Podcast by KevinMD shares the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from.

Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show, where we share the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from. My name is Kevin Pho, founder and editor of KevinMD. Today on the show, we have Mason Bennett. He’s a medical student, and he wrote the KevinMD article “A medical student’s unique education in a pandemic.” Mason, welcome to the show.

Mason Bennett: Thank you so much for having me.

Kevin Pho: So we’ll get into your article in a little bit, but first off, can you share your story and your journey to where you are today?

Mason Bennett: Sure, yeah. So I’m not a very traditional medical student. When I was younger, I served a two-year church service mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Romania. When I was there, I decided that when I got back, I wanted to work in something where I dealt with people. So I went to Brigham Young University afterwards and got an undergraduate degree in psychology with an emphasis in non-human primates. I worked at the Utah State Hospital for a while, and that was a really good experience, and it helped me decide that I wanted to go into medicine.

So I started medical school, and currently I’m at Trinity School of Medicine. I transferred here; my first school wasn’t a great fit for me and my family. We’re here at Trinity, and we really love it. It’s a really great place where I feel like they invest in the students, and we’ve been able to grow and thrive here, and it’s been a great experience.

Kevin Pho: So we’re talking at the beginning of October. Right now, how is the pandemic affecting your medical education?

Mason Bennett: So earlier in the year, we got pulled out of the hospitals and had to do online courses, and that kind of slowed things down a little bit. But it’s really made it very interesting, seeing how the different hospitals react to this pandemic and how they cover these kinds of things and deal with things like PPE shortages. In my pediatrics rotation, I was just in the pediatrics ward the other day, and they were telling me about how they keep having to transform it into a COVID ward. They just keep getting overflowed, and it’s been really interesting. It’s been quite the experience.

Kevin Pho: All right, let’s move into the KevinMD article and talk a little bit about how the pandemic affected your medical training. You wrote “A medical student’s unique education in a pandemic.” Now, for those who haven’t read your article, can you walk my audience through it and share the story of why you decided to write it?

Mason Bennett: Yes, sir, I can. So like I said, when I came to Trinity, it was a refreshing environment, one where I felt like I could grow and succeed. I felt like the school was invested in me, and I wanted to invest back. So I’ve tried to involve myself a lot. I joined the welcome committee, and I’m on the SGA here at the Georgia campus; I’m the chief justice.

When we got pulled out of the hospitals for a while, there was kind of a time when we were trying to figure out what was happening, and the school was setting up online rotations. There’s an opportunity here in Georgia called the MRC, the Medical Reserve Corps, and they reached out to the students. And I thought, “You know, I’ve got some time right now. I’m doing online rotations, and I want to involve myself some more.” And so I hopped on board to help with the Medical Reserve Corps.

They had opportunities all over the state to help with decontamination and help hospitals, and one that was available to students was at food banks. The food banks had all been closed down; they weren’t allowing volunteers, and the governor had mobilized the Georgia State Defense Force soldiers here in Georgia to man the food banks. There was a greater need, now more than ever, for people to get this food, and so the Medical Reserve Corps stepped up and allowed us opportunities to go be the medical support for these soldiers.

My wife really encouraged me to go. We just had the one car, and she was very pregnant with our second child, but we thought it would be a great experience and be able to do a lot of help. So I left for a couple of weeks to go to the food bank and served as the medical support for the soldiers, and kind of took care of them there. It was a really, really unique, really great experience to have during this time.

Kevin Pho: All right, so what was it like for you as a medical student volunteering at a food bank and for the reserve corps? Tell me more about that experience. Tell me about the day-to-day life of that.

Mason Bennett: So most of what I was doing was just like what you see when you go into a hospital a lot of times: just temperature checks, catching up on the soldiers’ health, and making sure things were OK. We had a couple of little incidents. Someone got their foot run over by one of the cars on a distribution day, little things like that. Some days it was a little frightening, because in this area, I was the medical support for these soldiers if something happened.

I remember one day, and I mentioned this briefly in the article, I got a knock on my door at 4 a.m. I thought I had slept in, and I pulled open the door, and the sergeant was saying, “One of our officers is sick. We need you right now.” And we went down to the room. One of the older soldiers there was diaphoretic. He was pale, he was coughing really badly, and he was having a lot of trouble breathing. I had everybody put on masks, I did a quick little exam and got a little bit of history, and we took him to the emergency room right away and passed him off there. We waited in the parking lot for a while as they took care of him, waiting to see what was going on.

I remember thinking really hard about what I was supposed to do, because we were supposed to meet with another group of soldiers that day from another location and distribute food. I was wondering if we needed to quarantine the soldiers who had been exposed to the one we had treated that morning, and it was kind of a run-and-go, scary situation. Thankfully, the soldier just had pneumonia, we think from being in a food bank refrigerator the whole day previously with some moldy food. It wasn’t COVID, and we were able to let the soldiers go out and help some more. But yeah, it was an interesting experience. It felt like a lot of responsibility, which was fun to do.

Kevin Pho: Now, before you went into this, did they give you any training?

Mason Bennett: Typically, the MRC does have training, so that’s something that they do: They’ll have these training sessions. Before that time, I hadn’t been able to attend any of the trainings or any of that, since I’d been in rotations, and the need was so great at that time that we didn’t go through much training beforehand. Thankfully, though, medical school does provide you a lot of training to help in these kinds of situations with basic medical needs, so I did have that.

Kevin Pho: And if you needed a backup, was there a physician available that you could call?

Mason Bennett: Of course, yeah. There was a whole chain of command, and there was a physician in charge of my group. In fact, one day we were running out of masks. We couldn’t find any, and I was able to give him a call and drive all the way over to his house and pick up a whole bunch of masks that we needed. And so there definitely was a chain of command during this whole situation. With the one officer who got sick, I was in contact with them, and they were giving me advice on whether or not I should stay quarantined and that kind of thing. So there was definitely some help available there.

Kevin Pho: So taking a step back from this experience and reflecting on it, what are a few things that you’ve learned from that experience with the reserve corps?

Mason Bennett: I think sometimes in medical school it’s easy. I mean, there’s a lot of stress. You’re focusing on passing tests and learning the things you need to be a good physician. It’s easy to focus on yourself a lot, getting done the things you need to. I think having a family has helped me with this, because I come home and I deal with my two sons and my wife, and I realize there are other people in my life I need to take care of.

But this was also another really great experience for me to practice that, to practice service and focusing on others during the pandemic, when I had training and knowledge that could help out. And so that was something that was very helpful to me: I can serve where I’m at. I think oftentimes in medical school we think about going on medical service missions or that kind of thing, going to other countries, but it showed me that in the places we are, we can lift others. Where we are, we can lift where we stand, and we can help out in the communities that we’re in. And that was a lot of fun for me.

Kevin Pho: Now, for the medical students who may be listening to this podcast, what are some of the other volunteer opportunities that may be available to them?

Mason Bennett: There are all sorts of things. You can always get involved with the clubs; they usually have things. You can find volunteer clinics. Georgia is really great in the fact that they do have the Medical Reserve Corps that you can join. A lot of the students who I’ve heard are in it, and a lot of the physicians I’ve worked with in it, really love it and are really great people.

There are a lot of really, really great ways if you just look for them. There’s this one person whom I follow on Twitter, and she noticed a PPE shortage in her town and had a lot of drives and fundraising events and efforts to gain PPE for hospitals and clinics in our area. So if you look for opportunities, I believe you can find them.

Kevin Pho: We’re talking to Mason Bennett. He’s a medical student, and he wrote the KevinMD article “A medical student’s unique education in a pandemic.” Again, talking to medical students who may be listening to this podcast, is there anything that you’ve learned over the pandemic that you could share with them as pieces of advice?

Mason Bennett: Something I’ve learned would be flexibility. Getting pulled out of training was obviously frustrating. You were wondering what to do, and being put on these online rotations wasn’t as involved or immersive as before. But I think just being flexible with what you’re dealing with and using this opportunity to take time to learn how to respond in a situation like this, because in our future, something like this, hopefully not, but it may happen again, and having the training could be beneficial. And so I would say be flexible and use this time to learn.

Kevin Pho: And my final question: Do you have a take-home message that you want to share with the KevinMD audience?

Mason Bennett: Looking back on this pandemic, I think we’ll think about a lot of interesting things that happened. I remember it seemed comical at the time, the toilet paper shortage and the early panic with all that. And there’s been a lot of division with people over what to do and how to respond. I think that it’s important in this time to come together and find ways that we can help each other out, not focus on ways that we are divided and not agreeing with each other, but ways that we can assist each other and help the people around us. I think that will show our true strength through this pandemic and make us come out of it as better people.

Kevin Pho: Mason, thank you so much for sharing your insight and stories. Thanks again for being on the show.

Mason Bennett: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Listen and followApple PodcastsSpotifyYouTubeMore apps · Browse all episodes