Metaphors & Medicine

“…and then, after the lapse of sixty minutes, (which embrace three thousand and six hundred seconds of the Time that flies,) there came yet another chiming of the clock” (Poe, The Masque of the Red Death).     In one of my favorite short stories, The Masque of the Red Death, Edgar Allen Poe hauntingly portrays people at a masquerade ball, pausing from their dancing only to listen in fear to the chiming of the grand clock that hovers above everyone. The chime serves as a reminder of the life that they are hiding at the ball from. Most importantly, for the 60 minutes between each chime, they dance and forget the racing of the clock, the swiftness of “Time.”     Last night, I reunited with former classmates and coworkers during an on-campus training event. To be around so many students like that made me feel the closest to myself and most distant to my past self simultaneously. Graduation was a mere 8 months ago, but that feels like yesterday while also seeming lik...

Yesterday, I picked up my younger brother and sister (now not so young at 13 and 17 respectively) from school and as usual listened to them rehash their days. I heard my sister talk about the exam she had tomorrow, the standardized test she had coming up at the end of the month, the extracurricular activities she devoted her time to after school. I listened to my brother talk about the Math test he needed to spend today studying for, how he hoped so hard for an A I could see it in his eyes. By this point, we had reached our neighborhood and I reached the STOP sign we always stopped at en route to our home. To go home, you would turn left. But if I turned right, I would drive to the elementary school where there was a park my siblings used to play at when they went to school there. Now they were older, and all I could hear from them was the list of commitments and things that were taking away any ounce of mental free time they should have at their age. "Who wants to go to the ...

This past week, I have felt loss in a way I have only felt once before. Six years ago, an 11-year-old boy in our community passed away suddenly while playing basketball. He collapsed, and that was it. He had a heart problem that no one had known about. He was the first person for me to see hooked up to a machine to be kept alive. He was one of my sunday school students, one of my mom's students, a community member, everyone's child just like I feel all these kids are. It was the first time I was hit with the reality of what it means to choose medicine. I am choosing to save lives, but I am also choosing to be at someone's bedside when I cannot do that. I am choosing to break a parent's heart in a way they had not been broken before. I am choosing to be a face they will remember as representing the worst day of their life. I felt broken for a few weeks after that instance and lost motivation for what I was pursuing. Luckily, that was in high school, and at some po...