Contributing Writer
St. George's University
Michael is a medical student at St. George’s University in Grenada, West Indies, Class of 2024. In 2016, he graduated from College of the Holy Cross with a bachelor of arts in english. Prior to medical school, he worked as a clinical research coordinator in Hematologic Malignancies and Transplantation at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Outside of medicine, he enjoys caring for his house plants, browsing med twitter and thrift shopping.
The rectangular device’s intrusive, sudden blare triggers a visceral response as I feel the plastic clip vibrate against my hip. I feel my palms flood like a wetland, sweaty fingers crashing against each other like driftwood washing onto shore. My mind wanders for a moment as I notice the reaction I’m experiencing.
It is a snowy day in April / The three of us each sit at our own windows and watch the remainder of our winters, / She says it came out of nowhere. / She means the snow maybe, or the Dementia.
When I reflect on ways to implement holistic care for the patients I work with, I think of the impact of my mother as a primary caregiver for my abuela’s (grandmother’s) medical care, despite not having a medical background herself.
My eyes locked on the upside-down words scribbled on the paper that was torn from my preceptor’s notebook a few moments prior. Dear God, my patient wrote, I am grateful for this life.
One young woman sits and waits patiently, scrolling on her phone to pass the time. A couple sits across the room talking softly to each other. The air feels light in the quiet room. A woman arrives, checks in, walks with heavy steps to a chair and sits down with a sigh.
he sits on the edge of the bed, forlorn – / eyes squeezed shut, back hunched over. / the veins snaking up his arms seem / translucent as he clenches the bed rail / in a death grip.
We are very excited to commence the 2023-2024 academic year with you all! As the years go on, medicine and medical education, inevitably, continue to evolve.
During my three weeks working in the pediatric dialysis unit and the post-kidney transplant unit, I noticed a troublesome trend. The whiter and younger pediatric patients were resting comfortably in the post-transplant unit with their new surgically placed kidney being meticulously taken care of. The darker and older pediatric patients spent countless, mindless hours attached to a dialysis machine with little hope for a new kidney after years of being on the waitlist.
In disease and in health, our bodies tell stories. But more often than not, these stories are left unheard and unseen. A meaningful method for illuminating untold stories is through traditional/classical dance forms. Dance especially is a space for knowledge and roles to be authentically represented. For marginalized communities in particular, traditional dance has for centuries been a medium for creative expression and healing despite how circumstances and society have complicated their access to care.
I opened their chart and scrolled to the recent notes section. A new title I had never seen before popped on the screen. There, at the top of the chart, “Deceased Note” was written in bold letters.
The beauty of medicine is that we are trained to see each person as an individual, not as a victim of their stereotypes. We are taught that we are more than our skin color, our religion, our clothing or our gender. But even though I see more than a patient’s demographic on static paper, those same patients, and sometimes even colleagues, fail to see me as more than just a woman.
As I completed my residency interviews, I recognized that we are hard pressed to find a better way to match burgeoning physicians with training programs searching for their next class of interns. Yet I also knew that neither I nor any other applicant could fit into a preconceived box or several sentence summary. I could not simply market myself as a humanist or an artist, or an activist or a researcher.
Contributing Writer
Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University
Mary is a graduating fourth year medical student at Sidney Kimmel Medical College in Philadelphia, PA class of 2023. She graduated from Villanova University with a Bachelor of Science in biology. In her free time, she enjoys reading works of fiction and history, baking and gardening. After graduation, Mary will be pursuing a residency in internal medicine at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center.
