Contributing Writer
Anne Marion Burnett School of Medicine at TCU
Chandana is a medical student at the Anne Marion Burnett School of Medicine at TCU in Fort Worth, Texas, Class of 2025. She graduated in 2019 from the University of Washington with a Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry and a minor in Medical Microbiology, and furthered her academic pursuits with a Master of Science in Physiology from the University of Cincinnati completed in 2021. In her free time, Chandana enjoys singing and was the founder of a band called UW Unplugged during her undergraduate years. She is also a trained classical dancer, and loves to read mystery novels. After graduating from medical school, Chandana aspires to pursue a career in promoting cardiovascular health in women through a blend of clinical practice and public health initiatives.
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.
…what remains is the removal of the layered white shroud: the only barrier standing between two humans — one dead and the other alive.
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.
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.
Because I could not stop for death, / He kindly asked I pause. / My arms were full of sterile wraps, / Scissors, tape, and gauze.
Pink playdough littered the exam table, sink, counter and floor. In a flash, a thin child, all elbows and knees, jumped athletically from the sink counter to the exam table and then to the floor, stomping over my feet in the process.
“Three, two, one … lift,” the circulating nurse directs as I raise the patient’s feet from the trauma table onto the recovery bed, gushing with the giddiness of getting to use my hands in a medical setting for the first time.
What does it mean to “grieve appropriately?” / To silently cry / as to not break the fragility in the air.
One of the most powerful paradoxes of medical education is that we learn how to heal the living by dissecting the dead. Our cadavers house the beauty and intricacies of human creation, the distinctiveness yet commonality of each human body and the finality of decline.
His diseased lungs / stiff like dry clay / function like gills out of the water.
Dying is not / as romantic as I once thought. / I think you always knew this.
Mr. G was a patient I met while on the surgical oncology service. He was in his early 50s, a loving husband and the father of two children. He was the middle sibling with two brothers. He also battled metastatic cancer.
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.
