Medical Student Editor and in-Training Staff Member Emeritus
University of Florida Fixel Movement and Neurorestoration Institute
Nita Chen is a current movement disorders fellow at University of Florida Movement and Neurorestoration program. She is Class of 2017 medical student at Albany Medical College. To become cultural, she spent her early educational years in Taiwan and thoroughly enjoyed wonderful Taiwanese food and milk tea, thus ruining her appetite for the rest of her life in the United States. Aside from her neuroscience and cognitive science majors during her undergraduate career, she holed herself up in her room writing silly fictional stories, doodling, and playing the piano. Or she could be found spazzing out like a gigantic science nerd in various laboratories. Now she just holes up in her room to study most of the time.
For the majority of medical students, gross anatomy is the first time that we observe and cut into the flesh of preserved cadavers. Whether it is through a longitudinal year-round program or a semester’s worth of concentrated anatomy, most of us develop a unique relationship with the cadaver gifted to us by generous donors.
Last Saturday evening I was on the admitting team in Orange County. We got a call about a hematology/oncology admission that we would later pass off to another team in the morning. We were told “fever with an ANC <500.” That admit, was Ronaldo, a young male with acute lymphocytic leukemia.
In the Gospel of Matthew, a man walks up to Jesus and asks him, “What good thing must I do to get eternal life?” Jesus replied by saying to uphold the commandments. The young man assured Jesus that he has kept all of the commandments and asked what else is required from him. In turn, Jesus replied, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”
I had plenty of time to board the plane, so I casually lounged around in the airport, waiting for the last call to board. He, on the other hand, was frantic because he thought he was going to miss his connecting flight. He barely made it onto the plane, and this is when two worlds collided. I had plenty of time to spare, while he was in a time crunch — this represents the first contrast in a story about contrast.
“Are you sexually active?” / His stethoscope gleamed in the light / Of the hospital room.
Hey Jimmy,
It’s me. You. Us, I guess. Don’t ask me to explain how time-traveling communication works. I assume it’s like the movie Interstellar (which you don’t know about because it hasn’t been released yet) or The Lake House. Anyhow, in roughly four years from now I, you, us, we will graduate from medical school and I thought it would be a good idea at this point, to write back to you just as you’re starting at Schulich Med in the fall of 2011. What I bring to you is a one-time offering of advice and insight. And no, I won’t give you stock tips: it doesn’t work that way.
It is no great mystery that burnout is prevalent in the field of medicine, and it almost seems as if studies and articles highlighting this sad and disturbing truth are published daily. The reality is that doctors and doctors-in-training often struggle with their profession of choice, citing disillusionment, depression, long hours, exhaustion and lack of empathy as either symptoms or causes of feeling burnt out.
For the majority of medical students, gross anatomy is the first time that we observe and cut into the flesh of preserved cadavers. Whether it is through a longitudinal year-round program or a semester’s worth of concentrated anatomy, most of us develop a unique relationship with the cadaver gifted to us by generous donors.
Plush carpeting / Sleek screens / Exotic fruit and / Green tea / First-class on trains is penetrable, and they have chips and soda / But there is no mistaking first-class in the hospital
It is one thing to be a doctor and another to be a patient. It is a radically different thing to be a medical student paired by your medical school to a physician who is your “patient-partner.” Sounds like a word salad, but that is where I found myself as a first-year medical student at The Geisel School of Medicine of Dartmouth a few weeks after moving to New Hampshire, weeks before I would receive my white coat, months before I would have any clear idea of what the medical world is really like.
In our undergraduate careers and as far back as high school, we were encouraged, and often required, to volunteer and serve our community. Whether it was a project we believed in or just something to put on our resumes, volunteering was a part of every medical student’s life before enrolling. As classes have grown more hectic and free time becomes scarcer throughout the years, service activities are often cut from the schedule. It is not unusual for medical students to leave behind passions; I know concert violinists who no longer play, Division I athletes who no longer compete, and people who traveled all over the world that never leave the library.
Eight weeks into anatomy class. Nine days into dissection of the head and neck. Forty five minutes into Tuesday morning’s anatomy lab and we are all searching for a place of solace.
None of us were prepared for the dissection of the face. As my lab partner, Simon, chisels a clumsy midsagittal chasm between the front teeth of the body lying before us, we brace for that moment of destruction when anatomic perfection turns into carnage.
Contributing Writer Emeritus
Penn State Hershey College of Medicine
Lisa Beyers is a class of 2016 medical student at the Penn State College of Medicine. Her writing career began as a child with a love of libraries and an unhealthy interest in office supplies. She lives in central Pennsylvania with her husband and two guinea pigs.
