“How’d you land in medical school?” Whenever someone asks me this, a family of frogs almost always immediately hatches in my throat. My long-winded journey itself doesn’t jerk tears, but the question always reminds me of the day I applied. The same word, like clockwork upon the inquiry, flashes from my heart like it’s a bat signal. “Widowmaker.”
Before medical school, my personal experiences with the health care system were mostly tied to those of my parents. Through my childhood and angsty teenage years, and certainly into my early adult life, I’ve watched my parents interact with medical professionals in several settings. Naturally, the moments of emergency have been some of the most memorable. On the day I planned to submit my applications to medical schools (for those of us who have been around the block, it’s the both terrifying and exhilarating day the AMCAS system opens), my father was hospitalized for an emergency cardiac catheterization while experiencing a massive heart attack, one infamously called the “widowmaker.”
This word, it evokes a soreness in me. It feels seared into my chest. It was first branded into me while my mother and I sat on soft blue chairs, awaiting news on the progress of the procedure. I don’t remember who first said it to me. I can’t recall whether it was a nurse, the attending completing the procedure, or one of the residents who, earlier, swiftly had us sign consent forms while she explained next steps and we followed her through blurry hallways and a sterile, heavy elevator. There are many days on which I wish I never learned that word. During an encounter like this with the health care system, with all its gravity and ballooning uncertainty, I honestly didn’t expect that I would.
When I reflect on my expectations of an emergency encounter, I find learning the term “widowmaker” to have been relatively unhelpful. I didn’t expect to have my fear prodded by anyone on the health care team while waiting for the completion of a life-saving procedure. I didn’t expect to be fully assured that it would all go well, either. I expected more neutrality, a blanket of nothingness in the waiting room, one pierced only by the hope that my mother and I deposited into it through prayer. I believed that medical environments should foster the pause of the pendulum in these moments, with some softness, too. While the term “widowmaker” has a long history and is likely found all across medical textbooks, its timing here severely compromised the neutrality I needed. It seized parts of the canvas onto which I could deposit any hope. In the moment, it left me lifeless, while my father was actually subverting lifelessness in the other room.
In hindsight, I think the use of the term was an oversight by the professional who said it to me. Still, I was able to shrink my disdain about it during the wait. It was shaded by my gratitude for the gentle, adept staff around me and those taking care of my father. Once he made it into the ICU, I witnessed his care directly. I also listened to my father’s firsthand accounts of the experience. Throughout his multiple-day stay there, he noted repeatedly that he was met with patience, kindness, and even slivers of joy. He found some peace in the conversations he had with nurses about his care status, his life, and, in between our visits at his bedside, his children. My father loves talking about us, and he felt like the nurses genuinely loved hearing it all. This, also, surprised me. My own experiences working in health care have impressed upon me what lies behind high rates of burnout in the field, especially among nurses. Meeting staff so spectacularly warm challenged my previously set expectations about what burnout can mean, how it can look, and where it may or may not persist. I considered now that, perhaps, it’s not ubiquitous. My father’s reflections reminded me that nurses continue to have strong wills to put patients first in a variety of ways, even when several circumstances may not make this easy for them. Where empathy remains possible and what it does are the lessons here for me.
Since then, I reflect daily on how I’ve been graced with the blessing of being able to attend medical school in the same clinical buildings where my father was, and continues to be, treated after that day. I went from questioning my entire purpose while staring at the AMCAS homepage from the ICU waiting room to starting medical school just over a year later. Even though I’m not the one with the stent, my heart was still heavy when school started. Some healing came from my assigned summer readings. Among many things, I read about empathy.
I keenly took note of Karen Armstrong’s step-by-step guide in her Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life. I admired her work to almost reinvent the paradigm in which we consider empathy. She reminds us of its all-encompassing nature, and for readers like me, extrapolates it out of the two main spaces in which it exists for us: in the clinic and in friendships. She provides pointed advice backed by historical considerations, from Confucianism to Christianity and a mention of nearly every war-ridden era. She pulls from scientific information about brain chemistry to explain just how we might tap into resistance of an individualistic culture, and provides a balanced reflection of all the moments in which selfishness is potentially logical and sound. Still, though, she ends the guide by giving the reader a sizable amount of homework: to practice the tools of living a compassionate life, because doing so is worth it, if not entirely necessary.
Coming down from the heartache I carried through 2022 while witnessing my parents age, I was pushed by Armstrong’s work to reflect on my interactions, both in medicine and all around it. I was pushed by my own life experiences and authors like Armstrong to closely consider the water I swim in; to ask where further exercising my mirror neurons remains possible and what it does.
This is a reference to David Foster Wallace’s This Is Water, in which he reminds readers that while we are the main characters of our own stories, life is bursting in between our own sequelae, and others are their own main characters, too. The depth we each know to have in ourselves exists outside of us in every other person, too. As fish, we wouldn’t know we were swimming in water unless we thought about it, realized it. Asking ourselves about the water we are in can make us more cognizant of the life around us, and that space we discover is all space we could fill with some empathy – all of it (I promise his delivery of this concept is better than mine).
Armstrong encourages me to practice love in crannies I didn’t consider before and, notably, hints at the utility of this. She, adding to a foundation Foster Wallace poured for me years prior, articulates a fluid empathy that can fill the shape of its container, making the ash falling from my heart over the past year feel not in vain. Armstrong also expands my horizons in such a way that, in my future practice of medicine, I may be able to relate to patients in ways I didn’t know I could. When we get to do that, I’ve now found, it’s collectively a painful, lucky, and special feat.
Now, at the cusp of my second year as a medical student, I spend a lot of time in the hospital. In fact, I spend an enormous amount of time in the exact same trauma bay, in the exact same ED rooms, on the exact same cardiac floors, and in the exact same heavy and sterile elevators that I did as a patient’s numb, helpless daughter. Now, through those identical corridors, I’m rounding, taking notes, copying down orders to Google later, and introducing myself in a white coat as a student they’ve never seen, and probably won’t see again.
From the outside, everything is different. My outfit, my position, the questions I’m asking, the notes I’m taking, the people I’m calling. On the inside, especially at the bedside of many patients, and always in the seat next to a patient’s family member, nothing is different. The soreness is evoked in me. The weight of my heart as if it was stone, it returns. My bat signal, it flashes. The blow of what it means to feel the same ballooning uncertainty, to remember the water the people in front of me are swimming in is the same water I know the current of, might never leave me.
I treasure, so deeply, that I have these heartstrings that billow out and fill the shapes of those hospital rooms; this refined capacity for empathy for the patients and their families whom I meet. While I don’t wish the events that led me here upon anyone, I feel graced with yet another blessing here: my ability to relate to these hurting people, even when it’s really hard, often helps carry me through these interactions. I haven’t found a day yet on which I sincerely hope that feeling fades.
To all of you in that water, I know, it’s terribly cold.
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For all my fellow bookworms and cinephiles, on empathy and building all relationships from a love ethic: All About Love: New Visions (hooks, 2000), Film: After Love (2020), Film: A Thousand and One (2023).
Image Credit: “Books n books” (CC BY-SA 2.0) by EternalEtulf
Managing Editor
Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School
Sabeen is a medical student at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey, Class of 2027. In 2019, she graduated from Rutgers University with a Bachelor of Science in Public Health, with minors in Spanish and Environmental Policy. She later earned her Master of Public Health degree from Columbia University, in 2021. She enjoys reading, hiking, cooking, and rating movies in her free time. In the future, Sabeen hopes to help prescribe joy for people of all ages and their loved ones through a career in family medicine.