Contributing Writer
Florida International University Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine
Mackenzie Mayhew is a fourth year medical student at Florida International University Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine in Miami, FL Class of 2022. In 2018, she graduated from the University of Miami with a Bachelor of Science in Neuroscience. She enjoys watching college football, crafting, and working out in her free time. After graduating medical school, Mackenzie would like to pursue a career in general surgery followed by a fellowship in transplant surgery.
It was obvious that something was off. His mood was not what I would expect from a patient who had received a transplant, which for many patients represents a second chance at normalcy and freedom from the restrictions of dialysis. As we started our trek out of the SICU, my attending continued to tell me Mr. W’s story.
Huh? Just like that, my confidence took a nosedive. Jeff could have spoken to me in Mandarin, and I would have been no better off in understanding what he had just said. Suddenly, I felt very small in my new white coat. Rhinorrhea sounded pretty severe. How dumb would I sound if I asked Jeff how long the patient had to live? I thought.
I learned English out of necessity — not only for myself but also for my family. I grew up in Mexico and moved to a small Northern California town at the age of eight. When we moved to the United States, I was placed in an English-speaking classroom with no one who spoke Spanish. Necessity forced me to learn English quickly and, as a result, I became my family’s unofficial interpreter, including at their medical appointments.
For current third-year students across the country, the pandemic hit at a notably unstable moment in our lives. Mere months after many of us began medical school in new localities amongst new communities, all was suddenly fragmented.
On Monday morning, a medical assistant finds me with a nasal swab in hand. I scribble my signature and temperature on the form he hands me. “Ready, Maria?” he asks, and then laughs when I groan in response. I tilt my head, close my eyes and wait for the worst part to be over. After 15 minutes of waiting in the student workroom, he tells me I am COVID-19 negative and set for the week.
We often find inspiration in our ability as humans to create anew. I too fall prey to the promises of New Year resolutions and birthday candles, beckoning to us with the allure that our future rests in our hands.
It is Wednesday afternoon and I have one last annual visit for the day. As I enter the room, a slender 27-year-old woman wearing a white t-shirt and baggy blue jeans sits in the chair across from me.
In the pediatric ICU, a call was received from another hospital to give sign out for a patient already en route. The child being transferred had experienced a traumatic brain injury. The child was intubated after receiving every sort of therapeutic management imaginable in a desperate attempt to salvage any remaining brain function, but the prognosis was dire.
“What about my sugars?” she asked. In all honesty, since she was not hypoglycemic, I had not examined her specific blood glucose level or hemoglobin A1c too closely. Scrolling through the extensive list of her lab results, I spotted them and felt a knot form in my stomach.
Freud supposedly understood himself as a surgeon of the mind, dissecting his patients’ mental anatomy through the process of psychoanalysis. I found this comparison appealing, so when I started the psychiatry clerkship in my third year of medical school, I approached the interview in psychiatry as analogous to a surgical procedure — efficient, scripted, precise.
Mr. T did not smile at me. No, I didn’t think it was because he was mean or anything; in fact, he was polite and had quite a calming voice. But honestly, it was hard to read someone’s facial expression behind a mask — at least during the first few months of the COVID-19 outbreak.
“I’m sorry that you have to see me this way,” said Ms. A as we exited the examining room. Twenty minutes earlier, Ms. A had been laughing and cracking jokes while my attending physician and I obtained her medical history and life updates.
Contributing Writer
Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine at Florida International University
Monica is a third year medical student at Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine at Florida International University (FIU) in Miami, FL class of 2023. In 2018, she graduated from FIU with a Bachelor of Science in biology and interdisciplinary studies. She enjoys photography, ballet dancing, and exercise in her free time.
