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Biomedical Odyssey

Life at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine

Reminders in Medicine: Patient Care Impacts Medical Training

Years of carrying a massive backpack full of books to make it here — to OR2 of the Weinberg Building at The Johns Hopkins Hospital — had given me terrible lower back pain at the ripe old age of 23. My goal was to focus on the procedure, but my back throbbed, and my sleep-deprived mind kept wandering. The sound of a phone ringing suddenly jolted me from my daze: “Pathology reporting on frozen section of iliac lymph nodes. Metastatic cancer.”

The air in the room changed, but the operation continued. “This lady is going to die,” said the attending matter-of-factly. It would have been easy to misinterpret her statement as cold, but I had witnessed this particular surgeon stay until 10 p.m. for her patients, visit with each of them during rounds and fight to get them appointments with specialists, so the weight of her words hit harder than most.

My problems were so small compared to those of this patient. When I saw her in the preop area just hours earlier, she looked dazed, as if she had been through so much already and had fully surrendered herself to the whims of the medical system. She knew she had cancer, but this surgery would tell her how much. Just before the surgeons wheeled her back, her family gathered around her to sing a lament. The words were beautiful, and when I saw her open her eyes afterward, I noticed that they had a little more life in them.

This is medicine.

I have only been on my third-year clinical rotations a for few months, but time and time again, I am reminded of how lucky I am. When I look out of the hospital windows at 5 a.m., the misery of my sleep deprivation is often broken by awe at the fact that I am here, at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine - my dream school. When those patients walk through the door, the ones that the medical system has given up on, with the hope that we at Johns Hopkins Medicine can care for them, I am reminded what an honor it is to serve them. And finally, when I am splashed with a sudden wave of reality that I am in the presence of someone who will soon die and that I have been given the chance to be with them now, in their last few months or days, I am reminded of the privilege I have been given to make these people feel better in any way, whether I am their surgeon or simply the person holding their hand while their epidural is placed.

Practicing medicine is a roller coaster. When you are feeling your worst, overwhelmed by exhaustion or sadness, or on the days when you simply feel that you are not good enough, your patients will always remind you that you are lucky enough to be yourself, lucky enough to be alive and healthy, lucky enough to be given the opportunity to serve others, and that this is what makes you good enough for them.

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model of a human heart

The Anatomy of Being Human

It’s 6 a.m., and my alarm goes off. Groggily, I continue to press snooze for the next hour, until I realize I won’t be able to enjoy a breakfast that’s not a granola bar if I sleep any longer.

It’s been six weeks since I started at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine as a first-year medical student, but time passes oddly in medical school. With the fast-paced atmosphere, sometimes I feel like I’ve only been here a few days, and at other times, a full year. At the moment, we are nearly finished with our Human Anatomy course, which is notorious for its rigor and intensity, but also the immense thrill and exploratory nature.

Class starts promptly at 8 a.m., but today I frantically arrive at 8:02 a.m., quickly settling into my chair to learn about the ventral roots of the spinal cord. Following the lecture, I head up to the anatomy lab and mentally prepare for the day’s dissection of the human heart.

Dissection of a cadaver is an overwhelming experience. It’s an immense privilege to be able to explore the human body in a hands-on setting, but it can also be jarring to face the reality of death and the passing of a human life. Today’s dissection is a particularly profound reminder of this. When my lab group and I remove the heart from our cadaver, we take a moment to pause and offer our deepest gratitude to the donor and her family, who gave us this incredible privilege for the purpose of our medical careers. Seeing an actual human heart for the first time takes my breath away — to imagine that this same heart beat throughout every single second, throughout every single memory of person’s lifetime — it was truly a special moment.

Dissection is easily my favorite part of the anatomy course. I came to medical school with a strong background in engineering and became interested in pursuing surgery as a specialty because of the many parallels between the two fields. However, dissection lab has given me an unexpected but enriched view of anatomical biology through the constant juxtaposition of science and humanism it forces us to face each day. The privilege of dissection reminds us that the heart isn’t just an organ, but also a physical representation of billions of seconds of another human’s life, their memories, relationships, fears. It teaches us that the hand isn’t simply the distal portion of an upper limb but once served as a source of warmth and comfort for loved ones, a hand that once held a child, a book, maybe a scalpel like my own. Even early in my medical education, I’m already grateful for this deeper perspective.

As the Human Anatomy course comes to an end, I often reflect back on my time in medical school so far. Although I’ve only been at Johns Hopkins for six weeks, it’s already been a unique and exciting journey, as each day brings something challenging and fresh. Constantly experiencing the multiple facets within medicine is what makes this educational pathway so special, and I can’t wait to see what the next four years will bring.

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