My Facebook feed has always been an eclectic place. Pictures of friends, clips from old TV shows, and collages of memes, news, and fun facts have always combined in a form of algorithmic chaos. But during the COVID-19 pandemic, and especially since entering medical school, my Facebook has been...
Three. It’s always been my favorite number – the one I’d write with neat curls on my elementary school fun fact questionnaires. The number I’d rely on in my paintings for the perfect balance of asymmetry.The number of people my friend circles tended to feel most comfortable in. Yet,...
On the eve of 2021, I felt like I was peering down an unlit road. Theoretically, I knew what lay ahead: my debut on the wards in scrubs and my embroidered Patagonia, six weeks to study for Step 1, then the glorious freedom of PhD-land after the summer. My...
Hospital Tour (n): a floundering attempt to mentally memorize maze-like routes down identical hallways while speed walking pell-mell behind a guide who believes he or she is offering you a beneficial service and not a panic attack
Q&A Session (n): an opportunity to sit in panicked silence while trying to...
At the beginning of medical school, I had started developing a vision of the physician I wanted to become. My background working as a nurse had allowed me to spend ample time at the bedside, helping me better understand how patients personally experience their lives in the hospital. I...
It's 6:45 am on a random Wednesday in July and I’m wearing the wrong size scrubs to shadow on the Labor & Delivery floor. Too-big top and too-small pants. The combination is dreadful. I am a formless light blue bedsheet billowing down the South Street Bridge, sweating hard in...
Trusting my hands has never come naturally. I still remember my stomach sinking when it was my turn at piano recitals. I’m useless at ball sports and until a few years ago the only things I assembled were PowerPoint decks. When I moved to Philadelphia, my dad built my...
The day before medical school began, I found out my dad was in the ICU.
The youngest of four siblings, he immigrated to the U.S. from South Korea fourteen years ago. When I got scared as a child, he would say “strawberries strawberries strawberries” over and over again to help...
“ADMIT BABY” flashed on the incubator, and it was the most bewildering thing, because the baby in question had not yet come.
A woman laid in the hospital bed, legs wide, expression unreadable. The moon-dome of her belly rose through her gown. Her husband stood still and quiet to her...
Love at first sight was a lie until I met him.
We met during the pandemic at a small gathering hosted by a mutual friend. A month later we took an impromptu trip to DC to see the cherry blossoms in full bloom. It was unforgettable, and so was dinner...
Friday night, at the start of the fall semester, I stood in my kitchenette—a segment of my bright Philadelphia studio—gently washing a peach. I was two years into medical school and a week into graduate school, turning a corner. First a peach, then a plum, an apple, an orange,...
The caterpillar crawls about, looking for a succulent leaf of milkweed to start her busy morning off right. Arising as a pre-butterfly is an honor, and it comes with a heavier workload than she expects. First off, the calorie requirements for cocoon preparation are enormous, and milkweed is so...
“Where do you see yourself in ten years?” “Do you know what specialty you want to pursue?” “How do you see yourself using your M.D. in the future?”
We all faced questions like this throughout the process of interviewing for medical school. In fact, these were probably some of the...
This piece was originally submitted on April 23rd, 2021
How are you feeling after 478 days of being fire-hosed with doomsday soundbites and click-bait headlines swirling around in a slow-and-low cooked propaganda stew?
Although the COVID pace of life initially gifted us with time to scrutinize available data and come to...
Medicine has always been about the process. In undergrad, we told ourselves that grinding on the MCAT was what we needed to do to go to medical school. Now, we tell ourselves that we need to grind in our preclinical classes to do well in our clerkships. Then, we’ll...
This essay is a personal reflection centered around the phrase “calladita te ves más bonita” (you look prettier with your mouth shut), an expression commonly utilized by Latinx people that reflects the generational and societal imposition of silence upon Latinx women, particularly when discussing issues of political opinion, racism,...
What do you even know?
Great question. Um. I know I’ve learned a ton. I’ve taken lots of tests?
What do you even know?
I seem to be drawing a blank at the moment. Can I look it up and get back to you?
What do you even know?
I know you’re not really...
I used to think people were just born great, but then I thought about my mom....
Make no mistake - moments of greatness were not too much for my mother - they were too little. She could not expect them to help her in the complex and unpredictable thrall of...
I was following a patient with a pituitary adenoma. On my third month of clerkships, I still had very little confidence in my neuro exam. That morning after rounds, my attending offered to go see my patient with me and work on my exam. Still flustered and easily embarrassed,...
Content Warning: This piece contains a description of sexual assault.
I grew up with zero desire to go into medicine. Never thought about it. Don’t know why I would have. First of all, I hated science because I wasn’t good at it. Second, I cared way more about what people...
A crisp, fall Sunday in Philadelphia could only mean one thing: game day. I sat perched on the air mattress that occupied my living room (in lieu of a couch, obviously, because I was a medical student living like a frat brother), can of watery beer in hand, eye...
"To help people." This short phrase has been used for generations, in a variety of forms, to respond to inquiries about what motivates students to enter the field of medicine. The cohort of medical students who matriculated in 2020 likely responded no differently. However, seeing doctors—whose positions we were...
Being on my first month of clerkships means that details most hospital staff take for granted often strike me as odd. Like how the keys to the morgue dangle next to the elevator keys at Presby’s trauma bay—an ironic metaphor for what polite neighbors we medical providers can become...
While I was getting my hair cut last month, the first question my hairdresser asked me was “Which high school do you go to?” at which point I politely informed her that I was most definitely not a high school student nor a college student. To her shock, I...
Medical education is constantly evolving, just like medicine itself. But as we’ve all probably noticed this year, major events in the world can precipitate a huge paradigm shift that sparks rapid changes. This year is one of them: the COVID-19 pandemic has radically changed many aspects of our daily...
Dear Second Years,
Welcome to clerkship, a year that taught me countless lessons, and certainly more than I am able to fit on one page. But of the many tips I have for you with my infinite MS3 wisdom (kidding!), here are my top three.
I was fortunate enough to work...
What happened isn’t important. What is important is that I am sitting in a cramped hospital office space asking a man why he feels that he needs to leave while in the midst of withdrawal and go to Hawaii. He is young, only five or so years older than...
My hands shake.
They always shake. At the wrong moments, at the most critical moments, when all eyes are focused on me, when the collective stares burn through the back of my hands only to make the shaking worse.
At least that’s what it feels like. It feels like heat on...
To be honest, when the idea that we could potentially get time off of clerkship was floating around, I was kind of excited. Like a snowday, I thought we might have a short reprieve from rotations, get to catch up on projects for a couple of days max and...