I was fortunate enough to be matched with a patient early on in the school year and stay with him through the time of writing this essay. My patient, who I will refer to as “John,” is a man who has lived a long, fulfilling life, and now unfortunately struggles with Parkinson’s disease and dementia. I only came into his life a few months ago, but I feel as though I have known him much longer. He is incredibly willing to share his life story, and I get the sense that he lived an incredibly peaceful life full of enjoying the small things that life has to offer. John was a high school biology teacher for several decades, and although he is unable to remember many of the details of his career, it is clear that he took great pride in his job and now enjoys the idea that he had an impact on many of his students.
Communication with John is not always easy, as talking for long periods of time appears to be a painful affair for him. As such, it is sometimes difficult to evaluate his thoughts or feelings, but I will never forget the first time I saw a big smile on his face upon my arrival. I couldn’t tell if he remembered me from week to week, but when I crouched down to make eye contact with him at the start of one of my visits and saw a beaming smile on his face, I got a glimpse into what my visits meant to him.
How I saw myself, as well as how I saw my role in medicine, completely shifted when, on a visit with John about 3 months after meeting him, his sister’s video called him. His sisters are scattered around the country, but try to video call with him about once a week, and although I had heard from John that he talked to his sisters, the thought never occurred to me that his sisters were still unaware of my visits with him. The nurse brought in the ipad with the video call and immediately each sister’s face lit up. The news of my visits with their brother was something that brought them peace. In that moment I realized that a large part of the value I could bring to healthcare was in the peace it could bring to the patient’s loved ones.
This program started by asking me the question of what made a good physician. Through first hand experience, I have come to appreciate the sentiment that good physicians are able to put aside their pride, ignoring the notion of the role of a doctor being to ‘fix’ a problem, and instead provide comfort to the patient if that is what the situation calls for. The comfort provided the patient, whether that be traditional palliative care, or as I have seen, something as simple as a little company, can not only be invaluable to the patient but also those in the patient’s life.
If I were to describe the value of this program in a medical school application, I would undoubtedly argue that this perspective of medicine is one that I would not receive through traditional medical training, yet is absolutely essential to my development as a prospective physician. This program not only exposed me to a side of medicine that is not often emphasized by medical training, but also offered me a unique perspective to challenge my preconceived ideas of the goals of medicine.