Contributing Writer Emeritus
Ross University School of Medicine
Dr. Morgan Shier, MD is a family medicine physician in Colorado and was one of our first in-Training writers in 2014 and a featured writer in our print book in-Training: Stories from Tomorrow’s Physicians.
My mother likes to tell the story of how, as a small child, I referred to the superficial wounds sustained in my first head-over-handlebars accident as an “abrasion.” I remember staring at my knee, fascinated by my body’s ability to heal itself. The sacred anatomy of wounds, atoms as spacious as galaxies, coalescing and woven with no instruction of my own to renew what had been lost.
Should the symbol of medicine bear one snake or two? / If you answered two, then the joke is on you! / Or, at least, that’s the current popular view.
I imagine her mother / Squeezing daughter’s limp hand / Silent tears
Anatomy is more than flesh and bone and blood. / It’s more than the donor and the scalpel teaching the student.
good morning, i’m the medical student / i must ask how you are feeling / even though my eyes already sting
A fog of emotions blankets the waiting room / Stress and anxiety, with some impending doom.
Logan’s healing was in his death. Mine was in a game of Monopoly.
If someone asks me how my first year of medical school went, half of the time I dismiss them with a one-word answer, saving them from a conversation they aren’t ready to have. The other half of the time, I tell the truth, just to see what they have to say.
Over the next few days, workup revealed she was experiencing paraneoplastic cerebellar degeneration, a manifestation of her occult cancer. In a matter of three days, a patient who had come in for seemingly benign constipation was told she had metastatic lung cancer.
After our first week on clinical rotations, my third-year medical student colleagues laughed about the silly and awkward things that made their first days hard. Someone was shunned for bumping into the sterile field during their first operation. Someone else couldn’t figure out the scrub machines and was stuck mismatching for the day.
Mr. Adams had heart; I will give him that. Presenting for ankle pain, altered mental status and shortness of breath, it quickly became apparent that a far more worrisome picture was being painted with each passing day.
Screams. Tears. Despair. / A sense of sadness in the atmosphere.
Contributing Writer
The Ohio State University College of Medicine
Kavita is a first year medical student at The Ohio State University College of Medicine in Columbus, OH class of 2025. In 2017, she graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a Bachelor of Science in biological sciences She enjoys exercising, cooking and reading in her free time. After graduating medical school, Kavita would like to pursue a career in emergency medicine or anesthesiology.
