Contributing Writer
Long School of Medicine- UT Health San Antonio
Kayla Privitt is a 3rd year medical student at the Long School of Medicine in San Antonio, Texas, class of 2025. In 2021, she graduated from Texas A&M University with a Bachelor of Science in genetics. She enjoys writing, camping, and hanging out with her cat and husband. After graduating medical school, she would like to pursue general surgery.
Going into my third year of medical school, my goals were simple: survive and figure out what I wanted to do with my life. My first clerkship was surgery, and what a chaotic start it was. I often felt like a burden on my team. I knew nothing and asked the exhausted, busy residents a lot of questions. I was a walking ball of anxiety those first four weeks: How many questions was too many? …
When you begin clinical rotations in medical school, people encourage you to be as involved as possible in patient care. They tell you to take initiative, to challenge yourself.
As we got closer to the ED, the excitement evolved into a feeling of discomfort. It was uncomfortable to feel even briefly excited by another person’s misfortune. I felt a sense of disequilibrium as I realized I had strayed from the delicate balance medical students and physicians continually try to find.
I start the day like most of us do: stimulating the needy vessels we call bodies with caffeine. As I open up my coffee jar to dispense ground Turkish coffee beans, I am met with a hint of loving bitterness. It carries a comforting brown sugar warmth that often stirs a sense of weakness given my inherent dependency on this substance but also commands secure boldness through notes of molasses and dark chocolate.
The once-sterile hospital room had become a sacred space, where the raw emotions of love and loss hung in the air. The young daughter, vibrant in her essence but tethered to life support, teetered on the precipice between existence and the inevitable.
After spending nearly a lifetime as a Type A perfectionist who struggled with developing new skills, I had spent the last several years trying to adopt a policy of “practice makes progress.” I have learned to accept the fact that being bad at something is often the first step towards being good at it.
We are given tools to imitate their behavior, in hopes that we ourselves will one day embody that behavior. Mechanical checkboxes on the standardized exam with standardized patients. Cannot forget a single step. But life is not standardized, is it?
Skepticism of health care is widespread throughout some of these communities — rightly so due to historical mistreatment, discrimination and lack of representation along with cultural differences. This distrust may be further strengthened by a patient’s own personal experiences. I respected this wariness, but I had yet to witness it firsthand.
Twenty years later, I still brace myself for the mispronunciation, even if I introduce myself first and enunciate clearly. Sometimes I give up and allow the mispronunciation to continue because I feel uncomfortable correcting them repeatedly. But I shouldn’t have to. My name is my name and should not be explored, like finding synonyms in a thesaurus.
A physician’s two favorite words: diet and exercise. Patients are constantly told that lifestyle interventions are the most important modifiable risk factors to prevent chronic illnesses like diabetes and hypertension.
Growing up, I wanted to be an actress. It amazed me how actors could make a story seem so real and how easily I would fall in love with characters I’d known for only 90 minutes. Most of the kids in my neighborhood would play outside together, but I always wanted to stay home and watch my favorite movie, Shutter Island.
I wasn’t expecting the morning report. / I wasn’t expecting to see images, / The death, the blood, the open eyes, / the open hands grasping at someone / long gone. Bullets buried deep.
Contributing Writer
UT McGovern Medical School
Emma is a medical student at the McGovern Medical School at UTHealth in Houston, TX, after graduating with a degree in English from Rhodes College. In her free time, she enjoys reading (and re-reading!), finding answers to questions no one asked and bemoaning the state of noise pollution. After graduating medical school, Emma will let you know what kind of physician she'd like to be.
