I shadowed a neurologist recently. As a high school student on the cusp of applying to college, I thought I’d’ spend the day quietly observing: watching labs get ordered, hearing terms I’d Google later, maybe seeing the human side of medicine up close.

But nothing prepares you for watching someone slowly lose their chance at life—not because of their diagnosis, but because two parts of the medical system weren’t speaking to each other.

The patient, I’ll call him Mr. D, was in his sixties. He had advanced kidney disease. Everything about his profile made him a strong candidate for a kidney transplant: he was mentally sharp, physically stable, and motivated. Except for one thing.

A stent.

Not in his heart. In his iliac artery, extending down into the external iliac, a critical vessel used to connect a donor kidney. That stent made that nearly impossible. It compromised the transplant majorly.

It was placed by a cardiologist a year earlier to relieve swelling in his feet. But it didn’t work. It had made things worse.

The neurologist reviewed the scans again, trying to find a workaround. There wasn’t a straightforward one. And I sat there, stunned, realizing what we were really witnessing: not just a bad outcome, but a break in the system.

No one had talked. No one had asked what might happen downstream. A decision was made, perhaps with the best of intentions. But without context, without collaboration, without pause.

And now Mr. D was almost disqualified from a transplant that could have added years to his life.

It’s easy to point fingers. To say, “Well, that cardiologist should’ve known better.” Or, “Someone should’ve caught this earlier,” but that instinct misses the point. The truth is scarier: no one owns the whole picture anymore.

In an age of referrals and EMRs and inbox consults, care becomes a relay race. Except the baton sometimes gets dropped, and no one looks back. We are excellent at managing body parts in isolation. But when it comes to stitching together whole-person care, the seams unravel.

I’m just a student. I don’t pretend to understand the complexities of medicine. But I do understand this: Mr. D did everything right. He showed up. He followed orders. He trusted the experts.

And somehow, that trust was betrayed. Not by malice, but by silence.

There’s something deeply unsettling about that.

I keep thinking about how this wasn’t a dramatic failure. No alarms, no malpractice, no headlines. Just a quiet one. A non-conversation that changed everything. Somewhere along the way, the system rewarded silence. Whether through overconfidence, oversight, or just pressure to move quickly. Ethics weren’t absent, but they were outsourced. Everyone did their part, yet somehow the whole picture got lost. And in the end, it wasn’t just a stent that blocked the transplant. It was a system that couldn’t stop long enough to ask, “How will this affect the next step?”

And who takes responsibility for that?

No one, really.

We say “medicine is a team sport,” but what happens when the team isn’t on the same field? When specialists are playing different games, using different scorecards, and the patient is the ball?

I don’t have solutions. I don’t know if this story would have ended differently if someone had picked up the phone. But I do know this: I can’t forget the look on Mr. D’s face when he realized what that stent meant.

It wasn’t anger. It was a resignation. Like he’d seen this before. Like he’d already learned the hard way that in medicine, even when everyone cares, no one is in charge.

That moment changed something in me. I came in hoping to see the future I wanted: white coat, confident decisions, lives saved. But I left with something heavier: the knowledge that medicine isn’t just about curing. It’s also about confronting the ways we fail each other and our patients.

Maybe that’s the beginning of learning how to do it better.

Cesar Querimit, Jr. is a high school student.