Columnist
Michigan State University College of Human Medicine
Hello! I'm Valerie. I'm from the suburbs of Detroit and graduated from Michigan State University in 2009 with my BA in Psychology. I'm currently living in Grand Rapids Michigan with my fiance Adam, where I'm now in my second year of medical school at MSUCHM. I'm the aunt of two little kiddies that I love to death (Asher 3.5 and Shana 1.5) and the proud mama of a silly red-brown dog named Bo. Before starting medical school, I sang in an a cappella group for 3 years, traveled to India, volunteered at a Navajo hospital in New Mexico and many other uninteresting things I won't mention. I still sing as much as I can, love hot vinyasa yoga, hiking, camping and spending time with my family. If I'm not studying, you can probably find me on my couch in sweat pants eating frozen yogurt, watching Modern Family, The Mindy Project or The Goldberg's.
Therapeutic Misadventures
Therapeutic Misadventures catalogs the unanticipated effects of medical school and is meant to provide a sense of the emotional roller coaster that is medical education. It is a peek into what it really feels like to be a medical student and the perpetual challenges that come with that life. Spoiler alert: it's hard.
how quickly one turns on oneself inner demons circling overhead like opportunistic infections ready to invade predator and prey so vulnerable unprotected and unarmed. survival of the fittest I wrote this poem just a few weeks ago during a moment of overwhelming emotions that felt all too familiar. I’ve been writing poetry since middle school; it has always been a source of refuge for me, an outlet for my deepest fears and anxieties. Letting my …
as I walk away from your linoleum tomb I run my tongue over cracked lips for the first time and they are no longer attached but hanging like you were and will always be suspended from cold mental concrete waiting for warm hands to pull you down and then pull you apart before your body bursts into a thousand crisp autumn leaves and the wind scoops you up scatters beautiful bright sun droplets over your …
The echo of heartbeats near the newfound graves, With the first breath of life and the last sigh of death Waving to each other in the night. Birthdays and funerals march along in unison, doors apart. Faces in scrubs rise and set with the sun, While those stuck in bed can only change their gowns, and wait. The rhythmic beeps of machines And the clack of shoes on the linoleum floor Sing a comforting melody. …
One of the things that I have learnt Ever since I have embarked on this long, long journey Is that with endless responsibilities Comes the increasing importance of prioritizing and letting go What matters most And what matters less Always in some sort of dynamic balance between Marching towards a tangible goal and Melting down in a binary world of studying and not. Twelve years, sounds like a long time So many years of …
They are your first patients we were told. And like with later patients, with them we shared discovery, struggles and triumphs. I learned from each and every one, so much, so generously, each and every day. But unlike any other patients I will ever know, when I was with them I was in the presence of extraordinary grace and giving. And in those moments when the sky was darkening outside the windows and the …
It was a Thursday in November, a day that felt like neither Thursday nor November a few weeks after my diagnosis that hadn’t seemed quite right, either, and here it was, on the page: the perfect trap, the perfect analogy. The patient (My Name No closing parenthesis. Now perhaps you’re one of those people who thinks that a missing closing parenthesis is just another typo, like a comma too few or too many. Perhaps you’ve …
A piece of cloth decorated with cartoon animals or light blue patterns. It can vary in size but not style. It brings fear, uncertainty and vulnerability. It symbolizes dramatic, unwelcome changes in people’s lives. It is a hospital gown. Wearing a hospital gown—naked underneath—you, the patient, burst the bubble of privacy and emerge upon an unusual level of trust. You reveal your most intimate moments as you lead your physician into your world. You ask …
We who were always overachievers. Who missed the dusk of our adolescence solving multiple-choice questions. We who began our adult lives spending alternate days with corpses. Who carry bones in our bags and books that break our backs. Who spend the best years of youth in the grime of wards. Who have already witnessed a lifetime’s share of deaths. Who learn about depression but fail to recognise it in ourselves. We who have no definite …
The skin is the boldest yet most bashful organ of the body. Parts of it will be exposed to the world’s eye with no problems at all. However, other areas are so timid that they are only exposed on the most embarrassing or intimate of occasions. The skin can tell a person’s life story — it can expose the lifelong struggles and daily grind of a coal miner, the bad habits of a longtime smoker, …
I want so much to put my art into the world, to share all that stuff that resides inside each of us and that for me falls somewhere between poetry, prose and prayer. But I also want to disappear from the earth, to take refuge in a singular devotion, like the nuns who ran the home for the children that I played with in my motherland. Part of me wants to wield policy and paperwork, …
Contributing Writer Emeritus
Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University
VyVy Trinh is a Class of 2016 medical student attending Warren Alpert Medical School at Brown University. Before entering medical school, VyVy spent a year working as a teacher in summer and after-school programs in her native Bay Area, California.
