Crow’s Feet
Joshua Stein Monday “Before you leave today,” said my surprisingly tall, bearded resident, “you should introduce yourself to the patients on our service so that they will know who you are tomorrow...
View ArticleDotting I’s
Kate Bock For the smaller challenges of medicine, like fitting an entire person’s pertinent medical status in the half-inch gap between names on the patient list. Listen to “Dotting I’s” here or below....
View ArticleA Third Year Opus — Chapter Three: The Tenant
Ajay Koti Part One This was not what the manager had in mind for her evening. An eccentric clientele was par for the course in her occupation. Low cost motels like hers tended to attract all sorts, and...
View ArticleTransitioning to the Clinical Years: Be A Duck
Photo Credit: Pexels. “Be a duck,” became my mantra throughout medical school, so much so that my mother had it printed onto a canvas and has it hanging on a wall at home in my honor. As a medical...
View ArticleA Lesson in Hope
I spent the first week of my outpatient experience in Internal Medicine working with the nurses at Hospice of the Red River Valley in Fargo, ND. Besides being incredibly nervous to begin my third year...
View ArticleA Third Year Opus — Chapter Four: A Walk on the Ward
Sunrise on the psych unit. A tentative, yawning flicker, a wash of tired fluorescence, and the hallway shudders to life—or something approximating life anyway. Bluish light cascades down greenish...
View ArticleSecond Day as a Surgery Student
“There must be a better way to make a living than this!” Slam. Silence, except for the persistent heartbeat. The beat of the ticking time bomb, the dying heart. It beat uselessly, against flapping...
View ArticleWhere Are You From?
“Where are you from?” A question that I am asked many times during the course of my day. But the answer has never been clear nor concise. I was born and raised in Dhaka, Bangladesh. I came to the...
View ArticleTransformation from md to MD
First year of medical school: Don’t remember much. MD/PhD students, you know what I mean. Learned how to use a stethoscope. Second year of medical school: Everything a blur except Step 1 introduced me...
View ArticleDifferentials
*** Summer It didn’t take long for the truth to come out. We had just completed our second week of medical school, the anticipated “Week on the Wards” in which each student was matched with an...
View Article403
“No acute issues overnight for 402.” “403: this guy kept me up all night!” I was writing feverishly as my resident was getting the sign-out from the night team. I wrote everything down, not knowing...
View ArticleAn Apology to Medical Students
Dear medical students, I’m sorry. You had just finished two years of didactic learning and couldn’t wait to feel like a “real” doctor. You were finally starting your clerkships, that is, finally...
View ArticleSmile
The entirety of the third year of medical school is an act. If you want to be a good medical student, you are what your team wants you to be. Amenable, pliant, easygoing — even when inside you are a...
View ArticleStairwells and Stethoscopes
Genre: Fiction Synopsis: A third-year medical student gets stuck in a stairwell on her first day of her surgery rotation. All she wants is out, but she meets a distraught mother of a patient and a...
View ArticleThe Victim of an Angry Attending: Five Ways to Deal with Criticism
I’m careful to put my mask on as I enter the operating room and make way to the anesthetist’s station. I gather the necessary tools from the cart’s drawer and place them on the table attached to the...
View ArticleHer Wardrobe
In high school, I was obsessed with wearing only vintage clothing. After hours of painstakingly searching every clothing rack at Goodwill, I would find a well-worn baseball jersey or an elaborately...
View ArticleReady to Go
The very first patient I ever met on my internal medicine rotation was someone who hated being in the hospital. He took every opportunity in the following ten days to remind us that he was waiting to...
View ArticleOutside the Room
I was called to a code the other day. Now, I should probably clarify: As a medical student, I don’t actually do anything (unless they really need people for chest compressions). In fact, I wasn’t even...
View ArticleThe Testing Epidemic
As I entered the hospital to begin an Internal Medicine rotation, I was eager to make use of the array of diagnostic tests I had spent the past year analyzing in board review questions. The thought of,...
View ArticleThe Glamorous Life of a Medical Student in the Operating Room
Some of my friends and family are really fascinated when I tell them I’m on my third-year surgery rotation. It is hard to convey how glamorous and inspiring it is, so I’ve written a short summary of a...
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