Contributing Writer
Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine
Raj is a third year medical student at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, IL class of 2024. In 2020, he graduated from Rice University with a Bachelor of Arts in degree biochemistry and a minor in medical humanities. He enjoys playing basketball, reading books, going on hikes, and trying out new recipes in his free time.
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.
An anxious, 36-year-old Hispanic female lays on the exam table, her feet in stirrups. A sleeved arm juts out between her tented legs as she stares resolutely at the ceiling. I wonder if she is afraid of what the amorphous black and white structures shifting on the ultrasound monitor may reveal.
Contributing Writer
Medical College of Georgia
Aleisha Khan is a first-year medical student at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta, Georgia. She graduated from Duke University in 2015 with a Bachelor of Science in Neuroscience. As a non-traditional student, she conducted neurocircuitry research on chronic pain in the lab of Dr. Yarimar Carrasquillo at the National Institutes of Health before obtaining her Master's degree in Physiology from Georgetown University. She also worked as a medical assistant in obstetrics and gynecology prior to starting medical school. In her free time, Aleisha enjoys running, yoga, tending to houseplants, and hanging out with her two rescued Whippets, Bleu and Sammy. She is currently undecided about her future medical specialty, but is interested in internal medicine, pediatrics, and neurology.
