It’s 3:30 am and my clock alarm is singing some song that I used to like. I roll over to turn it off all the while thinking to myself: “I am waking up to stand for the next 12 hours straight holding a retractor. No one is going to care that I am there, and if I am even acknowledged …
To the health professionals during hurricane Sandy: Thank you
Firefighters are heroes because they run into a burning building. They run towards a fire, risking their lives to save others. No one would doubt that they are heroic, but most will wonder how this is even possible. How is it that some people can ignore our innate drives to survive to instead, help others do just that?
Doctors are not typically equated with this type of heroic measure, we give …
The stigma of HIV continues today
If someone asked me at this point in the year, which happens to be nearly the end of my first one, what I liked most about medical school, it would have to be the patient’s stories.
I could do without the hours of science classes and my utter lack of motivation to learn any subject that I am told is important. I could also do without the people who need …
The side effects of cancer treatment go beyond losing your hair
For the sake of patient privacy, I am going to tell this story very ambiguously and hope that the insanity of it is not missed with the lack of details.
Because most of us do clinical training with non-pediatrician tutors, we have mandatory pediatric tutorial sessions. While I had already done a little bit of lung and heart listening on some children earlier on in …
The first child patient at a pediatrics rotation
Arriving in anatomy lab there was an obvious discontent in the air. People were slower to arrive than usual and then they were even slower to get changed in the locker room. Girls would start casual conversation, or would wait for 15 minutes for others to move from in front of their locker, just in the hopes that they would get 5 more minutes …
The first brain a medical student sees in anatomy lab
I do my clinical training at the VA. It is an interesting population because the people are all pretty similar (this will likely change as the army changes, but for now, its just a lot of old guys, and a lot of heart problems).
In our last few weeks, we finally switched to doing histories and physicals on patients (this really just means that we …
A medical student doing clinical rotations at the VA
When Professional Responsibility class began, I was most excited at the idea of not having to sit through another lecture on proteins and cell transport.
I was also looking forward to the class where we would be using clickers from the Library to poll audience responses during the lecture, as doing something while listening to someone talking has a much higher success rate in getting …
Is First do no harm really part of the Hippocratic Oath?
For the first time since I have been in medical training, I got sick.
Not just the kind of sick where its a cold, or you know that its stress, but the kind of sick that does not go away and randomly comes up just to make you mad when you just want to have fun (like …
What it means to be sick as a medical student
“I just want to learn the abdomen and the pelvis”, I thought to myself, while staring at our donor’s metastasized body. Nothing looked normal, tumor was everywhere, and for the 4th lab my group looked at each other, looked at the lab steps, and concluded it was going to be “just another day where we just … found what we could find and did … …
Cancer in the gross anatomy lab
Armed with tools I have never used or seen before I entered a physical exam practice room for the first day of learning.
Having finished history-taking practices last semester, we were now beginning a new chapter, learning to take a head-to-toe physical exam. Before class began, we were told to read a book and …
Doing the physical exam for the first time as a medical student
When does medical school officially begin? Is it when you are given your white coat? When you sit through your first orientation activity? When you listen to your first lecture? Or when someone first mistakes you for a doctor?
While medical school commencement is truly is an amalgam of all of these things, the answer to this question is …
Medical school starts with anatomy lab
Like any kid who always wanted to be a doctor, I went to medical school to learn how to help people. Just wearing the white coat during orientation week had people looking at me differently, expecting me to know something more than I did just a week before. One of my classmates was even asked for …
Medical students asking a patient about death
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