Vanessa Kady is a fourth year medical student at Florida International University Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine in Miami, FL Class of 2026. In 2019, she graduated from the University of Central Florida with a Bachelor of Science in health sciences and minor in psychology. She enjoys working out, reading, and the beach in her free time. After graduating medical school, Vanessa would like to pursue a career in family medicine.
There’s a room down the hall where a woman sits in silence, a shadow of herself, caught between jobs, between her husband’s labored breaths— the shallow rise and fall of waiting. They call it hospice, but only for those whose time they deem nearly spent. Yet her husband, with days stretched tight as thread, fails to meet the protocol, and now he’s slipping through the cracks of criteria, as if life were a ledger to …
Beating the chest, emergency surgery, stopping the bleed, The obvious ways to save a life, that which we all agree. Picture a doctor saving lives–what first comes to mind? The ER doc, the trauma surgeon, surely the first to find. But we often fail to see beyond in more subtle ways, How other doctors save lives through different displays. The patient with chronic back pain, feeling death the only solution, Relieved from misery by a …
In halls of sterile light and steel, Where pulses echo, hearts to heal, A quiet truth begins to rise— Care can’t be measured by device. For every chart, each test result, There lies a gap, a hidden fault, Where voices lost, unheard, remain— A silent burden wrapped in pain. From city streets to rural lanes, Health divides in unseen chains, A mother waits, her voice denied, As walls of care grow far and …
My patient sleeps peacefully. / I wake him guiltily. / I don’t want my face to be the first he sees.
The year turns four. / April weeps: the vootery / Of a heart too weak / To hold the stifling tears until December.
Medicine is a march, but it’s not like Sherman’s to the sea. You don’t burn what you leave, and the sea is always just beyond the next hill.
A few winters ago, you called me after a ski accident and announced / “I have fractured my tibial plate.”
Draped the head and steadied the bed / For the life-saving aneurysm clipping, / I stop thinking of my former life.
Your Smile / Wrinkles, / Where my jokes weren’t funny.
Filled with fear and pain but love and hate / To raise it alone since he never agreed
We stand beneath tin roofs / with raindrops on our lips / regret behind our eyes.
So, one way or another / I keep craning my neck / Looking up.
Contributing Writer
UC San Diego School of Medicine
Sarah S. Bassiouni is a first-year medical student at the UC San Diego School of Medicine. In 2011 she graduated cum laude from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee with a Bachelor of Science in biochemistry. Following this, she earned a Master of Public Health from the University of Michigan in 2016, and she has been a nationally certified phlebotomist (PBT(ASCP)) since 2014.
Sarah is passionate about eliminating health disparities both locally and globally. In her increasingly rare free time, she can be found writing in local coffee shops or hiking with loved ones. Sarah plans to pursue a career in academic medicine and global surgery.
