Contributing Writer
Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine
Max is a third year medical student at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, IL class of 2025. In 2017, he graduated from The Ohio State University with Bachelor's degrees in biomedical sciences and creative writing. He enjoys rebuilding cars and motorcycles, board games, and disappointing golf outings. In the future, he hopes to discover his career field and embrace it as a physician-author.
“Patient is a 34-year-old male with a nine-month history of rheumatoid arthritis-associated interstitial lung disease who is currently being treated with mycophenolate and rituximab. He remains on high-flow nasal cannula with oxygen saturations of 84-87% overnight. Transplant team signed off as the patient did not qualify for transplant. He reports feeling well this morning and that he learned a great new magic trick with a disappearing card.”
Oh God, what time is it? I stumbled over to my bedside table in pitch-black darkness, thanks to my new blackout curtains, which continue to be the best financial decision I have ever made, and checked my phone that was blasting my alarm.
At the start of clinical rotations, we are urged by preceptors to immerse ourselves in the experience, advocate for our patients and strive to understand them better than the rest of the team. I could not, however, shake an underlying thought: Why would any patient divulge their most intimate details to someone so inexperienced? After all, I was just a medical student.
I do not know what to say or feel when I first meet you. My first instinct is to introduce myself, but you can neither hear me nor reply.
During my family medicine clerkship in medical school, I worked with a free mobile primary care clinic dedicated to serving uninsured patients. Parked outside a church in a large city, the clinic was a large blue bus standing in stark contrast to the gray asphalt parking lot around it.
“How’d you land in medical school?” Whenever someone asks me this, a family of frogs almost always immediately hatches in my throat. My long-winded journey itself doesn’t jerk tears, but the question always reminds me of the day I applied. The same word, like clockwork upon the inquiry, flashes from my heart like it’s a bat signal. “Widowmaker.”
I placed the first pill on my tongue, opened my mouth so the nurse could see, closed my mouth, swallowed the pill, and opened my mouth again so the nurse could confirm that I had swallowed it. I had to repeat this for nine more tablets and this drill continued for seven days a week and for seven more months of the treatment.
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.
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.
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.
…what remains is the removal of the layered white shroud: the only barrier standing between two humans — one dead and the other alive.
Contributing Writer
Burnett School of Medicine at Texas Christian University
Monica is a medical student at the Burnett School of Medicine at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas, Class of 2026. In 2021, she graduated from the University of California, Irvine, with a Bachelor of Science in Neurobiology and a minor in Art History. She enjoys going on long sunset walks, visiting local museums and spending quality time with friends. She hopes to incorporate her passion for writing into her future career as a physician-author.
