Contributing Writer
Albany Medical College
Shilpa is a member of the Class of 2018 at Albany Medical College. She is a trained classical Indian dancer, a fruiti-vore, and a true lover of sleep. She loves indigenous-anything and usually responds to anything that has the word "traditional" in it. She can be spotted doing secret dance moves in her cubicle in the library.
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.
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.
“Ms. Mary is very excited to spend time with you,” the nurse said on my first day of hospice volunteering. From behind the nurse’s shoulder, I saw Ms. Mary rolling her power chair toward us, a toothless grin on her face. She looked up at me, her nasal cannula hissing with oxygen, and greeted me with her hoarse voice. I turned around to see that the nurse had dashed away, and left me alone to take care of Ms. Mary, who had heart failure, COPD, chronic pain and many other medical conditions.
A volunteer coordinator once told me that philanthropy is about “giving a voice to the voiceless.” I want, more than anything, to be worthy of that statement. As a premedical student, I had — and still have — grand visions of uncovering the hopes and dreams of the disenfranchised and trumpeting them to the world. I have used my voice to give encouragement to struggling children, frightened women and the demented elderly. I have held hands and written to members of Congress.
You made it. You were finally there. After thousands of hours of studying, dozens of tests, numerous volunteer and leadership experiences (to say nothing of many other sacrifices along the way), you had reached the pinnacle of your education. You earned the title you had so desperately yearned for: medical student.
“Neuroanatomy lab exam. You’ve got this. You studied hard. You’re good at anatomy, you know that. Okay, found a tag you definitely know. Start at the one you know. You’ll be okay.” It’s the way I try to start every exam. I try to talk myself up to push away all of the negativity slowly flooding my brain. Anxiety is a tough card to be dealt, especially in medical school. There are only so many ways to cope with the mounting pressure.
“Mais où sont les neiges d’antan? But where are the snows of yesteryear?” Not many people are experts in medieval French poetry. It’s a tiny corner of academia, filled with people whose passions and imaginations lie a millennium in the past. And so many of those academics, and I do use that term in the most tweed-wearing, bookish, kindly way possible, have their classes relegated to the far corners of campus, to buildings who are themselves of a different century. Or at the very least, of an era before air conditioning.
In many ways, the students of Class of 2017 have become my second family. In the warm August of 2014, each of us arrived at orientation from different walks of life. We became one in the quiet moments as we donned our ceremonial white coats one after another and nervously found our designated places next to our coating second years. It was not unintentional that we swore the Hippocratic Oath as one — it marked the beginnings of a four-year relationship with each other and our transition from civilian life into medical. It represented an unspoken first moment of camaraderie. It represented the first knot tied in this large professional community.
Recently, I’ve found myself dwelling on the past. Maybe it’s just a phase, but I hope it’s a sign of maturity, that I’m moving into a new stage of my life. Usually, I find myself thinking about a dreary February day I spent in Toronto. I was there for my grandfather’s funeral. I can’t recall much because I was seven. However, there are few things I remember: heavy, gray clouds smothering the sun, the gloominess and gray scale of a suburban Toronto cemetery, and the hoards of somber and unknown people, all lost to the sadness and reverence of those final moments.
On my left, the ragged, meaty stump of a severed neck stands upright like an abandoned signpost. A classmate examines it carefully. She is petite. She stands on a stool to obtain a better angle for observation. She cranes her neck, twisting the very muscles she is studying back and forth, back and forth.
I used to work as an anesthesia tech at a hospital in Austin, TX. I was surprised the first time a doctor asked me, his incredulous tone dripping with disbelief, “Why would you want to want to go to medical school?” It wasn’t the last time that happened, it wasn’t exactly making me excited to go to school, and it wasn’t a flattering reflection of the doctors that said it, but physician cynicism about the future of health care wasn’t something new to me, either. People fear change, but I think people’s perceptions about impending change are shaped just as much by their perceptions of themselves, especially the interacting dynamics between themselves and their evolving environment.
“Hello there,” I thought upon meeting my first patient in medical school. I did not get a response. Not that I was expecting one; my first patient was, as are most medical students’ first patients, a cadaver. She was draped with a bed sheet. Even when we began making the first cuts on her back, we kept her covered from the waist down.
Writer-in-Training
University of Illinois College of Medicine
Karishma is a Class of 2018 medical student at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She majored in English and Psychology at Northwestern University and hopes to go into surgery.
