Metaphors & Medicine

I am sitting in a coffee shop where I spent many days during undergrad studying, where my best friend and I played 20 questions to continue to find out about our deepest fears and dreams. It is also where I sat at the table that overlooked Lake Michigan as I wrote some of my best medical school application essays, where I renewed my intentions to accomplish my goals with each journal entry scrawled.                 Exactly one week from today is the first day of medical school orientation. Over the next week, I plan to write about the things and people that inspire me, or should I say write posts to them. So please forgive me for the emotions I am about to pour onto your screen. I have been an emotional mess with each passing day over the past week, and I feel it is only going to get worse. So the least I can do allow you to join the ride.           ...

Wake up to parents sitting in front of a rumbling television coffee cups in hand The rumbling is the sound of the footsteps of protesters, their anger rippling through the television across the world. Pour a cup of coffee for myself, check the social media to more rumbling more stomping more crying tear-gas crying and emotions raining mixed into a river down on Holy Ground. Turn off the phone, find breakfast, then find lunch. Wrap the softest scarf in my drawers around my hair. Find a cardio machine to run on, earphones in my ears, with blaring red headlines, "fake news" and real news sparing one another on one screen. Run faster and faster while the headlines grow worse, and the faces grow more orange the hair a faker blond, run until the pain in my legs is worse than the pain of watching headlines. Shower the pain away, watch it circle down the drain, into ground too far from holy. Hear Mama and Tata celebrate victory, watch videos and videos ...

Last week, I fell in love with the city of Minneapolis.                 I fell in love with the latte art in my caramel soy latte. I fell in love with the feel of used books with endless stories in their bounds at a small bookstore. I fell in love with the colors: the colors of the city lights at night, the colors of the graffiti art painting the life of the city on its walls, and most importantly, the color of its people. I fell in love with every ethnicity, with the ten different cultures decorating a single street, the languages on store signs, decorating the city with its calligraphy. I went zip-lining through the mountains and woods of Minnesota, where the drop felt more relaxing than terrifying, and shared laughs with a dear friend and her family.                 My best friend introduced me to the streets of her home, narr...

Some might consider this a morbid post, while others might understand its necessity. Over the past year, I have worked my hardest to exemplify optimism in the face of adversity, how experiences shape us to build us into stronger humans that are capable of handling the next challenge or chapter in our life. However, some days I am just as aware as everyone else of my own weaknesses. Today happened to be one of those days. During Friday prayer, the imam  discussed the concept of death during the khutba , or sermon, due to the passing of the relative of one of our community members. "How will you be remembered?" He asked. "Will people say that you were a good person? Will people pray for you after your death? Will you be able to answer to Allah (SWT) about your deeds? How much of your time on Earth did you spend preparing yourself for that moment?" Anytime death is mentioned, I feel like time stops. We are so busy racing and rushing from one goal, one job, o...

My favorite time for reflection is while I'm running. Hear me out. Think of that moment in movies where the character is looking out of the window of the car while it's moving. There is always some kind of sentimental music playing in the background. The character might even have flashbacks. Point is, you know they're reflecting on their life in that moment as they are driving past something or even just staring out the window after something just happened in their life. You know that because even you  are reflecting on their life and maybe even yours. This is part of why my favorite movies are sad and tragic ones: the music is phenomenal and my writer brain lives  for these moments the characters have that drives me toward reflection. My writing playlist is filled with many songs from movies or shows that have these moments. Running is my driving-in-the-car-and-staring-out-the-window time of reflection. So it should come as no surprise when I tell you that some of m...

One of my favorite series of stories as a child were the Classic Franklin Stories by Paulette Bourgeois. They always began the same: "Franklin could count by twos and tie his shoes..." From there, the list of the things Franklin could do were listed in different ways each time. When I read those stories, I liked to see which of Franklin's skills I could finally claim as well. This shows the true innocence of childhood.  Currently, the first sentence in the adult novel I am reading is "Seconds before our truck slams into the tree, I remember the first time I tried to save a life." (The novel is Lone Wolf by Jodi Picoult for anyone wondering :) How different and more complex adulthood is... On June 8th, I became an aunt for the first time as Zaida was born at 7:21 PM. We thought of her for the months before, imagined her little feet kicking her Mama's abdominal wall and tried to imagine the minuscule size of her fingers. That's about where the...