You probably started med school during the pandemic if…

• The derecho knocked out your power for at least 24 hours
• Your loved ones watched you receive your white coat via Zoom
• You took your class photo in the courtyard, clad in PPE and 6 feet apart
• You and your lab mates bumped face-shields while hunching over your respective donor to see a small structure
  • But then you wondered how all the classes before you had done dissections without these forms of PPE…
• You were instructed to take your lab scrubs and coat home to wash after every dissection
• You unconsciously constructed faces for your classmates and were shook when they removed their mask beneath their shield to take a sip of water and looked completely different from what you had thought
• You took your last anatomy practical online
• You didn’t get all the free food you were promised when you interviewed
• You ate while you watched lecture at home and consequently nearly choked on your food every time Swailes presented a GIF of a spewing sphincter or Ruby showed a photo of familial hypercholesterolemia (MOHD I, Lecture 46, Slide 14) unannounced
• You celebrated finishing an exam on Friday afternoons by treating yourself to take-out dinner for one, instead of hitting up the legendary Big Grove Brewery you’ve heard so much about
• You flipped a green “Sanitized” card over to its red “Needs to be sanitized” side after eating lunch at Java House
• You made friends by sharing your hobbies and interests on a shared spreadsheet with your classmates
• You practiced your physical exam skills on your pillow
• You interviewed your first simulated patient via Zoom
• “Swipe in, Swipe out”
• You became more acquainted than you ever wanted to be with your professors’ nose hairs gazing down at you through the Zoom camera
• You never got as acquainted with your professors as you would have hoped
• You got your temperature checked each time you entered the hospital to attend an ECE or at PES sessions
• You upgraded your personalized Lego-style face helmet from CCOM for one of Amazon’s glasses-style face-shields
  • Because you quickly learned that there is such a thing as cool face-shields and if you ever hoped to wear your hair down again, you’d need to fork over the $20 to buy a pack
• You never got to hug your friends when saying goodbye at the bus stop after lab…or any other time for that matter
  • But you did palpate the femoral pulses of classmates you’d never met while a PETA-on-a-Pole struggled to see and evaluate your performance
• You almost had a heart attack when you realized for some unknown reason your face took over the speaker screen during Zoom class and you were the subject of 1 eternal second of your peers’ scrutiny
• You didn’t get to say goodbye and thank you to your donor the way you had hoped
• You realized how thoughtful many patients are when they expressed their  sympathy that you had to wear PPE day in and day out, yet they were the ones afflicted by cancer
• Your greatest anxiety came, not from classes like everyone all those years told you it would, but from deciding whether or not to travel back to your hometown to see family over winter break

It’s been a journey, my friends, and as all cheesy sayings go, this is just the start. During this exceptionally strange and challenging time, we have so much to learn about our world together. But ultimately how we come together and make it better is what counts. So here is to the start of a new semester with you: may we connect more so because of this distance and find the pearls upon reflecting on each experience so that we might create something beautiful and new, to help our future patients and to help our world.

A bullet point reflection with some humor and some melancholy touches on what I perceive to be shared experiences from M1s starting at CCOM during the SARS-Cov2 pandemic.” – Anonymous

Anonymous Creator