Monthly Archives: March 2023

Waiting Impatiently

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The gray of New England spring hung low as I traveled home from the airport. In short time, March would deliver the snow-rain I know the month for in the region where I grew up. I learned that the cold and gray, which can span 9 months out of the year here, was not for me when I left New England the first time. I stayed away for almost a decade until a desire deeper than my love of sun brought back to the state my parents chose for us so long ago, Vermont. I wanted to become a doctor. Medical school takes a forest of strong trees by your side – it takes a lot of willpower on your part coupled with family and friends to complete. Something made me pause when my medical school acceptances gave me the option to leave New England again. I didn’t leave then, choosing to stay close to my parents, my siblings, and my new Vermont friends. My compromise was a plan to move to southern New England, Connecticut, for the second half of medical school because my school had a clinical campus there and it suited me better than their Vermont campus.

I think the choice to stay close to family worked. As I write this, I’m waiting impatiently because in a few long days I learn where I’m headed for residency and, unless I’m gravely mistaken, I’ll leave New England once again. As a side adventure during the Doctorhood Quest, I scooped up a New England-grown husband. I often wonder if understanding the winters here is an important thing he and I have in common or if it’s just everything else that makes us a good match. I’ve also gotten to see my parents and sister more during medical school than in the almost decade leading up to it. I have good friends who saw me through the worst days as a medical student. I’ve come to call my Connecticut town home, even if the designation is fleeting.

This March’s late rain and snow squall isn’t unique to this region at this time of year – though it would seem other places where snow is unusual are getting slammed, weather patterns are becoming more and more confusing as climate change forges on. And while my roots are familiar with the snow and the cold, a few days ago I returned from 7 weeks in Puerto Rico so the coldness and gray is particularly unpleasant this week. It stands out to me how miserable March is here as I look out my window over my flowering orchids and assorted houseplants, many of which grow as weeds in Puerto Rico. It was at the ripe age of 18 that I learned how much I love the sun and living in sunny places even though I require sunblock, shade trees, hats, and other sun protection to enjoy the sun without turning into a lobster.

On Monday this week, I and many medical students across the country found out we matched into residency. And now, in a typical medical school approach of drawing things out longer than is reasonable and with no efficiency and minimal logic, we are all waiting until Friday until we learn the magic WHERE we matched. The day we learn where we will go for residency is called Match Day. Transitioning from medical school to residency is a boring process that makes little sense, so don’t ask about it. Just know that this week is moving at half the speed of any other week these past 4 years and that my excitement for Friday’s discovery is exploding. My excitement even makes the cold and gray outside acceptable though not welcome. Residency is the next and the last phase of the Doctorhood Quest before I am a doctor. I could, of course, continue onto fellowship after residency but that would be to further specialize. Residency will give me the skills needed to practice as an independent generalist in internal medicine (in my case, those pursuing other medical paths might finish residency as surgeons, psychiatrists, or neurologists to name a few areas of medicine that can start after residency).

I’m excited for what’s to come. I made a picture frame for taking pictures at my Match Day party with “Adventure Awaits!!!” written on it. Perhaps you get the Up reference. The picture frame is a party feature that’s a throwback to my Paraguay days. Paraguayans know how to throw a good party. At my Match Day party, there will be an ice cream cake, food, a banner, and streamers. And, of course, I’ll celebrate with my family. I’ve been working towards this day, the day I get into residency, for 10 years. It’s hard to believe I’m here, but it feels real. I can’t wait for it to be Friday, March 17 aka Match Day 2023.

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I Don’t Think That Thought Process Means What You Think It Means*

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One day on rounds (the time when physicians, residents, and students discuss the day’s plan for each patient they’re caring for) I commented on a patient’s amazing carpenter veins (colloquial term for veins on the back of the forearm which tend to be prominent in people who work with their hands). Having once put in IVs for a living, it’s hard to shake my deep appreciation for a good vein when I see one. The physician leading the team and a resident both stopped and asked, “What do you know about carpenters?” They asked this as if I couldn’t possibly know anything about people who are carpenters. It was a joking question which is common in medicine when calling out someone’s knowledge gap.

I was completely dumbstruck by their assertion that I couldn’t have interacted with many carpenters in my life. After a long pause, I mumbled something about having put in IVs as part of my work before medical school where I had many carpenter patients with these veins. I was confused because sometimes I forgot that many people assume all med students have no experience outside of university classrooms and have doctor parents, or at least white-collar parents. If I had been less taken aback, I would have told them I know a lot about carpenters in a happy, matter-of-fact tone.

My father is a carpenter. My stepfather and mother don’t call themselves carpenters but they both do a lot of carpentry as part of their regular lives and as part of their work. I, myself, have helped build houses, furniture, and theater sets. In fact, one of the more memorable childhood photos of me depicts an elementary-aged me hammering a bolt into some floor beams. In double fact, my first work was in carpentry helping my parents build our house and working on paid building projects. Which is to say, short of being a carpenter, I feel confident calling myself an expert in what the life of a carpenter is like (without even mentioning all the carpenters I’ve cared for as patients since I started working in healthcare as an EMT years before medical school).

As humans we make many assumptions because it helps us organize the world – for better or for worse. Physicians are trained to come to quick conclusions and identify disease patterns almost as quickly as their patients decide if they like their new doctor or not. This is why your doctor will often only ask four questions before they decide how to investigate your knee pain – their experience has taught them how best to understand medical situations and make a strategy for those situations in a 15-minute appointment. Obviously, there are many medical situations where more than 4 questions are needed, but I say this as an example of how physicians are trained to make even more assumptions than the average person already does.

Often, the assumptions physicians make about medical symptoms are helpful because they lead to quick recognition of life-threatening medical conditions so they can be addressed in time to save someone’s life or allow the physician to develop a reasonable method for exploring the situation further in the confines of an overburdened, short-for-time system like the US medical system. But, as we all hopefully know, assumptions are dangerous when they come to making conclusions about whole persons. Note the difference between assumptions about symptoms versus about people. It’s assumptions about people that lead to biases.

It’s assumptions that play a role in the dark side of healthcare – like black people having their pain undertreated or receiving inferior medical treatment and transpeople receiving poor medical care (Google these if you want to know more, there’s plenty of data. There are also numerous other examples of disparities in health stemming from biases and assumptions about people).

Now, the assumption that I, a medical student, hadn’t interacted with carpenters before was erroneous on the part of my supervising physician and resident, but it doesn’t compare to disparities in care secondary to biases and assumptions. I brought those up in the previous paragraph to illustrate some of the ways assumptions infiltrate medicine beyond what I experienced and beyond their helpfulness in identifying diseases quickly.

What my situation does show is that the mental picture that many people in the US (including physicians themselves) have of who US doctors are is a bit out-of-date. There was a time when almost all doctors were white men, and many were from doctor families. And, today, the percentage of white male physicians is still greater than the percentage of white males in the population. And, separate category, there are still many medical students who have doctor parents or white-collar parents. Yet, while this is true, it is also true that things have changed a lot in medicine.

Today, there are more women than men enrolled in US medical schools. There is also a growing contingency of doctors and medical students who aren’t Caucasian (check out this article). There is also a growing percentage of medical students who will be the first doctors in their families (check out this article and this data)

There was a time when most physicians became physicians without ever leaving school – they’d pass from high school to college to medical school to residency. Today, the average age of people starting medical school is 24, which means that they took 1-2 years off from school somewhere along the pipeline. And that’s the average, meaning a significant portion of people starting medical school are older than 24; people like me, I was 29.

All this is to say that who medical students are now is different from what most of our older patients and seasoned physicians have seen most of their lives. For example, as the carpenter story suggests, my teaching physicians thought I was naiver than I am and had a different background than I do. As a different example, as a female medical student my older patients (mostly the men) think I’m a nurse. I find this particularly ironic and amusing because my husband is a nurse; he has no interest in being a doctor and he is a far better nurse than I ever would or could be given my nature.

Looking at the modern world of medicine and the medical world we want for our future, it’s time to check our assumptions about medical students and reevaluate who they are because their backgrounds may surprise you. And to disclose one of my biases, I think the diversifying of the physician force is awesome and, perhaps more doomsday, the only way we’ll solve many of the medical profession’s problems.

*Attempted The Princess Bride reference, not sorry because Inigo Montoya summarizes my thoughts more often than I would like to admit

Tropical Paradise Has Challenges Too

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“I didn’t have power for 4 months. My daughter got lice because we couldn’t bathe properly; with my long hair, I got them too when I picked them out for her. We washed our clothes by hand. During those months, some areas started to get power and I was able to bring my big items (like bedding) to a laundromat. I lived in a place where I wasn’t allowed to have a generator. But even the rich people with generators didn’t have power because you need gas to run generators and we didn’t have that. I couldn’t keep food all that time because my fridge didn’t work. It was hard… So, I think we all have a little PTSD when it comes to hurricane season,” a Puerto Rican said, recalling her experience during Hurricane Maria. She’d just given me a tour of San Juan’s primary hospital campus, including pointing out the street where they used to have shipping containers lined up to hold corpses during Hurricane Maria because they couldn’t identify them fast enough.

“It was bad. Help didn’t come or it was delayed,” she said. I remembered this; it was all over the news. Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017. You might remember the politics of the US then; there was a lot of news about the hurricane’s effects and how the US government delayed or didn’t send aid. Perhaps 3,000 Puerto Ricans died, but we’re not exactly sure of the true number. Many more lost their homes.

I remember someone asking me if Puerto Rico had been rebuilt since Hurricane Maria when I left for Puerto Rico. At the time, I found the question odd because it’s been 6 years since that hurricane struck. But I have an answer now and have come to realize that it was a good question. The answer is: yes and no. If you visited Puerto Rico today, your first impression would be that it’s a tropical paradise and you might fall in love with the place. There’s a reason why Puerto Ricans are so proud of their home. As a tourist you’ll enjoy both friendly hosts and living accommodations equivalent to those in the continental US. But if you dig deeper than the average tourist experience, you’ll discover that the island has challenges. Despite the beauty of the island and its strong identity people are leaving Puerto Rico. This Washington Post article describes the situation of Puerto Rican’s leaving their home (and people leaving other US territories too).

If you explore beyond San Juan (Puerto Rico’s capital and biggest city), you will see shadows of Puerto Rico’s complicated situation. In the town where I’m staying (and all throughout the island), you find deserted houses on most blocks. A coworker explained that sometimes people just leave their homes and move, often to the continental US. The pay here is lower than in the continental US (often in general) but especially in industries of interest to me such as healthcare. Infrastructure throughout the island, like healthcare, is much like in rural regions of the continental US, which is to say that many people don’t have easy access to the healthcare they need.

My husband and I visited a small island just off Puerto Rico’s coast called Vieques. It’s where the brightest of the 3 bioluminescent bays in Puerto Rico is and that’s why we visited. Being me, I had us walk the 5ish miles from the ferry to the town in which we were staying. Again, being me, I googled to see if there was a hospital on Vieques and the number of beds it has (as I do everywhere I go) just in case I wanted to move there and work. I learned that Vieques doesn’t have a hospital because it wasn’t rebuilt after being destroyed in Hurricane Maria. I also noticed signs demanding that the hospital be rebuilt on a chain-link fence as we walked across the island. On our walk back to the ferry from our Airbnb, a local stopped to offer us a ride because it was hot. We accepted. I can’t remember if I asked about the hospital or if it came up naturally in conversation, but the local explained that the hospital hadn’t been rebuilt and it was a point of political tension. Further, in 2020, a teenage girl died because there wasn’t available transport to San Juan when she needed it and Vieques didn’t have a ventilator to help her breathe. According to the local, even the family of the girl helped manually give her breaths (with a bag-mouth mask which is what EMTs use on ambulances until they get to the hospital), but she died anyway.  

From these conversations, I’ve learned that Puerto Rico has a complexity that can be overlooked as a tourist. Living here a few weeks has not made me an expert (or even a novice) in Puerto Rican anything…except maybe dengue because I’m doing an internship about it and fruit juices because they are delicious. But my time here has allowed me to see that beyond the beautiful beaches, blended frozen beverages, and seafood Puerto Rico has a historical, political, and economic reality. Puerto Rico reminded me of the confusion I had while living in DC: It is odd to me that there are territories that are part of the US where the inhabitants aren’t granted the right to vote and to have congressional representation because it seems rather undemocratic. I don’t know if it would change anything in Puerto Rico if they were represented in US congress or participated in US presidential elections. I also I don’t know if that is something Puerto Ricans want. But, at the very least, I’ve come to see that I have a lot to learn about Puerto Rico’s history, its current governance, and its relationship with the US before I can fully unpack my experience living here.