Metaphors & Medicine

Dear Readers, This is for accountability. How often have we felt as though we've lost a part of ourselves and we miss it more than anything or anyone else ?  Well I have been hungry for the writer in me. I miss the ease with which verses used to pop into my mind, surprising me during daily activities. I miss the melody my fingers had on the keyboard as I bounded out another piece or blog or story. Today, a woman I know from a writer's group I was a part of a few years ago came up to me and said she missed my writing in the group as I provided a different voice. She reminded me that that's why I began writing: to give perspective into a different  voice.  Additionally, these days I have begun to panic about the quickness with which medical school is approaching (orientation is in 5 weeks!!!!). So for the sake of that, my goals begin today.  This month, I will: 1- Journal every single day . Prose. Poetry. A sentence. Words. Anything . 2- Post a...

This chapter is very very late, but here we go. A few weeks ago, I closed one chapter to begin the next. I put on my "Medical Scribe" tag for the last time. Typing charts that day felt like an art, as though I was playing the melody of each patient's story with the keys of my keyboard, like playing a song on a piano. During my final shifts, I was alternating between feelings of exhaustion and wanting to be done and small moments that I knew I'd be nostalgic for; teaching moments that signified that art of medicine and my passion for it. My last shift in particular was special and it wasn't at the same time. The shift went by smoothly, very differently from the high stress shifts I had the days before. The pace of patients was steady, I completed my charts in no rush, and I had time to let it all sink in: in a few months time, I would be taking the steps to becoming the person I had spent so long working with and aiming to be. That night, the physician dismi...