Resident Physician Guest Writer
Yale New Haven Hospital
Pranav Reddy, MD, MPA is currently a first-year resident in obstetrics and gynecology at Yale New Haven Hospital. He attended medical school at Alpert Medical School at Brown University and studied public administration at Harvard Kennedy School. Pranav has worked on issues at the intersection of health and human rights for marginalized populations in Rhode Island, the Dominican Republic, and India.
Last week, the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) announced that Step 1, the first of three required licensing examinations for medical trainees, will stop reporting three-digit scores and instead report only a pass/fail designation as early as January 2022.
It was not until our second semester of medical school that we started gross anatomy. Finally, I became that quintessential medical student walking home too tired to change out of my formaldehyde-tinged scrubs.
Second year? Could that be? It felt wrong. It threw off my whole identity. “I’m just a first-year,” had been my motto for the past twelve months.
It was a Friday afternoon in the middle of October during my second year of medical school. I, along with my classmates, was preparing to complete our formal graded “check-off” for intubation.
First year of medical school: / Don’t remember much. / MD/PhD students, you know what I mean. / Learned how to use a stethoscope.
A frail elderly gentleman was wheeled in on a stretcher and left alone. His paper-thin skin lay gently across his delicate frame like fine linens. His mouth lay agape. His slightly yellowed sclera framed the piercing gray eyes cast upward at the harsh fluorescent lighting. He didn’t blink. He didn’t cry for help. He awaited the inevitable on a stretcher in a hallway of a fully occupied emergency department. I was confused and scared at the apparent lack of treatment he was receiving. There was no crash cart prepared for him. He wasn’t attached to telemetry. He didn’t have a nasal cannula. He lay in bed alone — in waiting.
Barely into my second year of medical school, I already have a reputation — I love asking the uncomfortable stuff. Social history, sex, drugs, alcohol, I want to know it all. At first, it was just because that section randomly fell on me during small group sessions or standardized patient encounters. Then, I began to volunteer, or be volunteered. “Mariya loves the dirt,” my classmates say. Without saying, I always approach this section of the …
“My rheumatologist was the one who told me I have cancer because for nine months we thought my back pain was due to a type of arthritis. He felt really bad about it and when he called me to tell me the diagnosis, he started crying on the phone.” A student in my second-year medical school class says this when we are in the big lecture hall for a class presentation on how to give …
Last spring, I saw my first real patient. The plan was to go into an exam room and take the history and physical of a real patient who had graciously offered to sacrifice half of his day. A doctor would watch everything and give feedback. The intimidating fact that I was being monitored made me feel like I was about to go on stage in front of an audience. If you had followed me into my …
Though I am currently a second year student at University of Vermont, I actually started medical school back in the ’80s in an ancient and venerable school in England, granted the royal seal by Henry VIII. Even just twenty-five or so years ago, the nurses still wore uniforms not significantly different from that worn by Florence Nightingale herself, and they kept their heads bowed and eyes demurely averted on ward rounds. I remember that there …
Contributing Writer Emeritus
University of Vermont College of Medicine
Peter Wingfield is in the Class of 2015 at the University of Vermont College of Medicine after more than two decades as an actor in the UK, Europe and North America.
