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.
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.
As medical students across the country enter their fourth year, many will travel thousands of miles to acquire global health experiences from the far reaches of the globe. While much can be learned by exposure to the stark differences among health systems in other countries, there is no doubt that such health disparities also affect the lives of vulnerable populations in our own communities. As a fourth-year medical student, I spent four weeks conducting a community health needs assessment of Burmese refugees in my hometown of Waterloo, Iowa, where I began to learn the meaning of global health at home.
We huddled around in a circle. Some rubbing our necks, some touching our wrists, and some listening with tears streaming down our faces. It was a room of physicians and physicians-in-training, listening as one resident shared her story of watching her patient pass away when she ran a code for the first time. At the conclusion of her story, physicians and students approached the resident with hugs and advice.
The call for a more global medical curriculum — one that not only recognizes, but prioritizes health issues that transcend national, political and cultural demarcations — is coming from all sides. American medical student interest and participation in international electives is considerable, and surveys indicate that its growth has accelerated in recent years.
As physicians-in-training, it is tempting to accept that we have no place to stand up to our colleagues or superiors. That we should just hold our tongues, keep our mouths shut, dodging confrontation like the plague. This is false. From the day you received that acceptance letter in the mail, you committed your life to protecting others. What was it uncle Ben said to Peter Parker? “With great power comes great responsibility.” At times, this might mean getting uncomfortable to do the right thing.
Tick-tock. Tick-tock. The only clocks in the room were the digital, silent type, but still I heard it. The first hurdle to becoming a board-certified physician was looming as the ticking in my head grew louder. It is now the summer following my second year of medical school at the University of Minnesota, and students across the country have just taken the eight-hour-long, 308-question U.S. Medical Licensing Examination Step 1. Here I outline some of my experiences preparing for and taking Step 1.
On Valentine’s Day weekend last year I found myself at Paddles, the local dungeon in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood, for the first time. I was perched at the alcohol-free bar when a man politely introduced himself as a human carpet. He asked that I tread on him and lay on the floor to demonstrate. A professional dominatrix-in-training stepped onto his chest and buried her stilettos deep into his belly. His eyes were closed, and he looked calm — blissful, really. As a medical student, I winced, imagining the arrangement of his delicate organs in relation to her vicious heels.
On the first day of my surgery clerkship, our chief resident gave us a few instructions for our next two months together. We had to carry certain types of gauze and tape in our soon-to-be overflowing white coat pockets, create a clear and confident daily plan for each patient we followed, and be ready for rounds at 6 a.m. the next morning.
Columnist
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
Katie is a Class of 2016 student at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, in New York City.
Pleural Space
Pleural Space looks at the experiential curriculum of medical school, the many things that are taught and learned that aren’t listed in a syllabus.
