5 minute read
What Lessons Have Been Learned to Improve Medical School?
2020 MCMS Medical Student Essay Contest Winner
Standing in the hot Arizona summer sun, together with dozens of volunteers giving up their Saturday to help sort a parking lot’s worth of donations to be shipped to the Navajo Nation, I was reminded of this quote, often attributed to Seneca, that was inscribed on the shipments of masks donated by a Chinese company during the peak of Italy’s COVID-19 crisis. Young and old alike, we all stood with sweat dripping around the contours of our masks, placing bags of rice, beans, canned food, toiletries, and more into boxes for shipment to our Navajo neighbors. The collective community effort to amass the tons of donations itself was impressive – an hour into the shift, there was barely space to walk with all the boxes of donations that had been unloaded to be sorted. Despite the fact that grocery stores and supply chains had been disrupted for all of us, people were still giving what they could with such open arms. As I watched a five year old boy who struggled to spell “donation” on the sorted boxes instead master the tape gun and use his talents to help create an endless supply of pre-assembled boxes to hand off to the other volunteers who dug through the donations to assemble care packages, I smiled. This was just one of the many times during the pandemic where I was awestruck and uplifted by the love and ingenuity that pours out despite collective suffering.
Despite all the goodness I saw through COVID-19, internally, as a medical student, there was a deep, disturbing dissonance that I couldn’t shake. On one hand, I felt the pressures that come with being a student – we are told to study hard now and do well on STEP 1 so that we can secure a future and be a good doctor like the thousands of doctors who work at the frontlines, putting their needs aside to save the lives of others. On the other hand, I felt the desire to find ways to help the community during a time of uncertainty and struggle – after all, as someone going into medicine amidst one of the largest healthcare battles of our generation, how could I stand around and be idle? Inherently, education can feel like a selfish pursuit – a system that is designed around the pursuit of individual knowledge is not a system that rewards selfless acts for the common good. Every hour that I spend studying is another hour I could have spent delivering groceries to elderly neighbors, designing informational flyers to support COVID-19 information dissemination, or finding creative ways to help healthcare workers stay safe amongst PPE shortages.
The irony of it all is that most of us join medicine because of a desire to help in one shape or form, yet in the pursuit of this noble goal, our desires can often become muddled by the competing demands of a rigorous education system and the rewards of delayed gratification. How might we help students face this dissonance and tear down the semblance of a false dichotomy? How might we build medical education systems where we can have confidence that our value in healthcare can start before we have the two letters behind our name – that our ability to succeed as a physician won’t be measured by our STEP scores but will instead be measured by a selflessness that doesn’t wait until we are full-fledged physicians?
The lessons that I have learned from COVID-19 are the lessons that will make me a good physician, a good citizen, a good friend, and a good neighbor. They are the lessons that books can’t teach and scores won’t show. From the cable companies providing free Wi-Fi to children and families so they could transition to online schooling, to the Michelin star restaurants converting to soup kitchens to feed the needy, to the breweries converting beer recipes to hand sanitizer machines, to my medical school peers rallying others to give blood and collect PPE, to the grocery stores giving extra hours and extra support to the elderly and immunocompromised, I saw a world where empathy and kindness trumped profit and selfishness. I saw a world where healthcare workers and frontline staff stepped in to work longer hours and sacrificed their personal lives, often sleeping in hotels or in their offices to prevent spreading the disease to their loved ones at home. I saw unsung heroes like taxi drivers drive symptomatic patients to the ED to be tested, free of charge. I saw a world I wanted to be a part of – a world where I didn’t stand on the sidelines in pursuit of the next exam or the next educational milestone. I saw a world I’d be proud to tell my future children about – a world that saw beyond difference and personal struggles and rallied around our common humanity.
Through struggle, we see human resilience and generosity rise, as we stand in solidarity knowing we are all waves in the same sea. The fear of an unknown virus - the wrath of an indiscriminate disease - affects all of us, no matter race, country, educational status or identity. Though the pain of coronavirus has been deep, the rallying spirit of my loving classmates, family, friends, and strangers has taught me lessons no curriculum could ever prepare us for, and for that, I am forever grateful. To those who have sacrificed, loved, and given during COVID-19, you are my teachers, my heroes, and you are the ones who have reminded me that the journey to becoming a great doctor starts now in the choices I make and the things I prioritize.
By Patricia Bai, MS-II, Mayo Clinic, Alix School of Medicine, bai.patricia@mayo.edu
