First-Gen Doctor
As a child, I felt safe in my home. I felt seen and understood. In 1985, when I began medical school, I had friends who felt like family, smart, idealistic women who grew up near my home in Somerville, NJ. Cathy was a study partner who carpooled with me to the Piscataway campus every weekday. Nancy became a close friend when I joined her in a summer job at Ortho Pharmaceuticals. Together, we worked in the mouse lab, making monoclonal antibodies which we harvested, pooled, and froze.
My ability to shelter my tender heart grew. I was no longer the budding phlebotomist who cried after her first day of using a needle repeatedly. Over time, I became skillful, priding myself on getting blood with only one painless stick. After sacrificing hundreds of mice in an efficient and mechanical way, I regret to say that this was good preparation for clinical training.
In my third and fourth years of medical school, the campus moved to Stratford, NJ, too far to commute from Somerville, and I shared an apartment with Lydia, another med student, during the week, going home to be with my husband, Jack, on the weekends.
In my fourth year, I lived at home for a few weeks at a time because I chose four-week clinical rotations nearby. Proximity to Jack was more important than where I would study. On each rotation, I looked for someone who shared my values, who would have my back, someone from my soul circle.
I got recommendations for Union Hospital, an hour north of us, where students get to do a lot of procedures. On my first day there, I was placed under the care of Barb, one of the interns. One year ahead of me in training, she’d graduated and gotten her NJ physician license. She showed me how much I needed to learn in one year. She knew tricks; she had mnemonics; she was sure of herself.
“So, I’m on call tonight,” she said. “Do you want to stay and see what a night on call is like? Tomorrow’s Saturday, so you can leave at 7 am. It would be a 24-hour shift instead of 36. I can get you some scrubs.”
I was all in. “That would be great!” Not feeling prepared to do a night on call was one of my biggest anxieties. In my eagerness and excitement, I forgot to call Jack to tell him I wouldn’t be home until morning.
My mom was the first to plant the possibility of going into medicine. As she helped me pull freshly-laundered sheets across my bed, she said, “How would you feel about signing up for pre-med for your freshman year?”
“Wow,” I said. “I hadn’t thought about it. I was looking at English or foreign languages, like you and Dad. But medicine could be interesting. Let me see what the requirements are for pre-med.”
“You’ve taken enough science and math classes,” she said, “and you’re smart.”
I could see she had been thinking about this. Let me try this path for a while to see how it fits, I thought. That openness to try something new set me on a whole new trajectory. My mom had asked me to be a first-gen. No one in our family was a doctor. In fact, both of my parents were the first in their families to go to college. My mom understood paving a new path. I didn’t anticipate that my new path would cause hurtful mistakes, like forgetting to call my husband when my schedule changed.
When I got home from taking call at Union Hospital, Jack’s eyes were red, but he was too angry to speak at first. Then he started yelling. “How could you not call? I called the hospital, and they couldn’t tell me whether you were there or not!”
I wasn’t in the best shape either, after a night without sleep. “I’m sorry,” I said. I got caught up in what I was doing. I just forgot. It won’t happen again.”
“Well, it better not! I thought you were dead!”
That painful morning was just a small taste of the trauma that was to come in the next few years. There’s a lot of pressure on firsts. There’s no one to prepare you for the rigors of training, no one to tell you that the book learning of medical school is the easy part, no guarantee that there will always be someone from your soul-circle watching out for you.
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Thanks for reading,
Deborah
Love this insight into your world!