Contributing Writer
Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine
Max is a medical student at Case Western Reserve University, where he is also pursuing a master's degree in bioethics. He is passionate about learning Spanish, and hopes to practice medicine in Spanish-speaking communities at home and abroad.
Medical students take on a massive amount of responsibility beginning the first day of school. From passing pre-clinical tests, to perfecting the physical exam, to performing well on Step 1, we hold ourselves accountable for a high level of academic achievement to ensure successful transitions into the clinical years and residency.
“Puedo tomar su presión? Puedo tomar su pulso?” I butchered in Spanish, over and over again. Sometimes I received a smile and laugh in return, sometimes a look of confusion, sometimes a placid unfolding of the patient’s arm. I pumped the cuff up repeatedly and listened intently over the screams of playing children and the chatting of a long line of patients.
Today, a person’s zip code is a better indication of their health than their genetic code is. We know that physical communities experience shared sickness, whether linked to trauma, viruses or unavailable nutrition, and there are established biomedical consequences to poverty and segregation. Acknowledging these links, however, only gets us so far; successful intervention demands thinking deeply about the relationship between patients and their communities. Rochester, NY is home to an innovative attempt to combating these issues. It is one that challenges traditional ideas of what factors define health and consequently, what metrics define therapy.
A few weeks ago, I was describing my team’s discharge plan to the patient I had been following all week. We had found an anterior mediastinal mass on imaging, and the pulmonologist wanted to follow-up in a week after immunohistological staining came back. I told him we felt he was now stable, and that we would like him to follow up with the lung doctor as an outpatient within the week. He asked me if he should return to the ER to get his appointment.
One of my friends told me today that she shadowed in the emergency room on Friday night. She told me they had a patient who was pronounced dead on arrival after being shot 24 times. Unfortunately, this is a typical narrative for our emergency room on a Friday night. I wish I was surprised, I wish I didn’t already know the story, and I wish the news of another young life prematurely and senselessly erased from this earth even made the news.
A torrential thunderstorm forced nearly the entire homeless population of Tampa Heights out from under their tents and awnings in favor of the more generous cover of a highway overpass. It was the closest Tampa had come to a publicly funded homeless shelter.
This is one of the more disturbing sequences in a show that is invariably unafraid to tackle uncomfortable topics head-on, such as terrorism and sexual misconduct. The fact that this also happens to be my favorite sequence in television might warrant a discussion with my therapist. But that’s neither here nor there. Notwithstanding the resounding innuendo of the unpeeled banana, Louis CK left nothing for the viewers’ imagination as he dreams of a scenario in which Al Qaeda finally understands the merits of liberal society.
On the day of my white coat ceremony, I felt like a pretender. I squirmed in the rigid, wooden seat, staring at the gilded columns and towering proscenium of the hall, wondering when I’d be found out. I imagined them calling me to the stage, slipping on the coat, then seeing me in it and saying, “Well, that doesn’t look quite right.”
In her memoir “The Cancer Journals,” radical feminist and civil rights activist Audre Lorde documented her experiences as a woman with breast cancer recovering from a mastectomy. Lorde was a black lesbian and patient who is “defined as other in every group I am a part of. I’m the outsider, both strength and weakness.”
President Obama’s executive actions on immigration over the past few years have been met with reactions of both jubilation and opposition. At the border in the Rio Grande Valley, the new law’s effects are acutely felt within a community that prides itself on the blending of American and Mexican culture. The new rules will allow countless mixed status families to remain intact without fear of deportation.
“And do you have a husband at home?” “A wife, actually.” “Oh, excuse me. And how long have you been with your mate?” the physician answered. He was unflustered and looked expectantly at the female standardized patient sitting across from him. For the remainder of the interview, when it came up again briefly, the physician referred to the patient’s wife as her mate.
“In all seriousness,” the attending physician says, “he can wear women’s underwear to minimize the pain.” “Can he really?” “Absolutely,” replies the attending. “If we can’t prescribe any pain medication, then tighter fitting clothing can help keep things from jostling about too much.”
Contributing Writer Emeritus
Tulane University School of Medicine
Corbin Pomeranz is a Class of 2016 medical student at Tulane University in New Orleans. He received his B.A. in Psychology and Studio Art from Kenyon College in 2007.
