I assume you know about Schrödinger’s cat, which represents quantum uncertainty by existing simultaneously both dead and alive in its box. The cat will only establish a singular state because it is observed as you open the box.
And as all imminently graduating medical students can tell you, that’s kind of what the national residency matching process feels like. Continue reading Schrödinger’s Match
2017 was strange mix of freedom, commitment, and uncertainty. Never in med school have I had so much unscheduled time, during which I committed to and hacked away at several big projects. Meanwhile, I also made enormous binding decisions, the result of which still floats in a cloud of vague possible futures…
Yesterday night, I fulfilled my goal of going up onstage at a Moth live storytelling event to tell a story. Continue reading Telling a The Moth story
It’s the beginning of my fourth year of med school and I just finished my four-week sub-internship rotation in Internal Medicine. The rest of the year is filled with mostly research, random electives, applications, interviews, and unscheduled time. Thus, I’ve had an uncomfortable realization: this is it. This is essentially as mature as my medical understanding will be before I get “MD” stamped behind my name in June. Continue reading 18 weeks of practice
It started last week because we had several moribund patients, patients who we knew were imminently going to leave the hospital through the back door. Every morning, when I walked into the hospital and check my team’s patient list, this awfully morbid game played through my head.
If we’re talking in programming terms, the “_Medicine Red” list is an unsorted set of entries of patient names representing the patients we are currently managing. Names are added to the list when they are admitted through the emergency department or transferred from other teams. Names are dropped from the list when we discharge them, when we transfer them to other teams, or when they die. In simpler terms, our list of patients tells us who to treat, and changes in our list are a big deal. Continue reading A moribund game
As I’m working through my medicine sub-internship (the closest to on-the-job doctor training as we ever get in med school), I have met a handful of memorable patients that have forced me to ponder our place in medicine as doctors. Like, in a non-ironic non-philosophical way. Continue reading Doctor versatility versus obligation
Imagine the city as a living body. In that body, the roads would be its blood vessels. Traversing those roads are us humans, wandering through the tangle of highways and roads like like blood cells pumping through a maze of arteries and capillaries. Among them — about 1 in 300 — are us white coat-clad doctors, like those 1 in 800 white blood cells wandering among the red blood cells. Like those WBCs patrolling and protecting the body, doctors are the city’s healers.
So what does that make hospitals? Congregations of sick cells and a place where white blood cells go to work? Continue reading The city a body, the roads its vessels
A few days ago, eight weeks into my cooking project, I found a package of sliced cheese tucked under the vegetable crisper. It was rather moldy. I chuckled a bit before chucking it.
I used to buy that cheese every two weeks. It went in the same sandwich that I made every day to bring to the hospital. In the sandwich also went versatile ingredients like tomatoes, mushrooms, and spinach; they were things I could throw into random entrees to cover dinner. I cooked regularly before 2017; in fact, I got by all of third year only buying cafeteria food but once (a chicken wrap in Queens; it was meh). However, priorities were minimal thinking time, flexible utility, and financial efficiency. For four years, my food — including that sandwich — were boring.
I haven’t needed that cheese for eight weeks. Continue reading Embracing the Kitchen
