Writing Prompt

The Appendix Journal sent out a call for submissions in the month of September regarding first year medical students’ experiences beginning medical school during the COVID-19 pandemic. First year medical students nationwide are experiencing an incredibly dystopian introduction into healthcare. Historically, no other cohort of medical or PA students has begun their careers during such a tumultuous time and we wanted to hear all about it.

2020 was supposed to be an exciting year for not just me, but my entire family. My older brother was graduating medical school and starting residency, I was graduating college and starting medical school, and my younger sister was graduating high school and starting undergrad. We were all excited to attend each others’ graduations and celebrate four years of hard work. Technically, we all graduated, but none of us had real ceremonies because of the pandemic. And while that was sad, especially for my mom who had spent as much time invested in each of our education as we were invested in our singular education, 2020 was a reality check for all of us and not just because of COVID-19.

The pandemic has been one of the most altering experiences I have had in my life. Never have I seen anything like it, and I hope I never will again. The U.S. has suffered more than most because of the ignorance perpetuated by failures in our country’s handling of the situation. To think that people are so quick to disregard infectious disease experts and scientists and medical professionals. It was shocking, especially as someone starting a career in medicine. The consequence was a very lengthy quarantine with a continued necessity for social distancing. While the end of senior year and the entirety of my summer became rather monotonous and full of strange hobbies, August finally came around and with it, medical school.

As someone who really loves socializing, it has been hard to do so here. We spend most of our time outside of MERF (the Medical Education Research Facility), at home, listening to lectures on Zoom. I’m sure Dr. Rubenstein’s material is hard enough when he is five feet in front of you in a lecture hall, so it was definitely difficult keeping up through Zoom (or more often Panopto). However, I think CCOM has done more than most schools to ensure at least some sense of normalcy with anatomy lab and small group sessions (although I can barely hear people through the layers of PPE we have on, but that won’t necessarily go away with the pandemic for healthcare providers). Nonetheless, it has been difficult interacting with other medical students, especially in a new state. I do want to note that I completely understand the necessity for these measures to be taken. These are unprecedented times that have been plagued with an ever-growing list of struggles.

But back to the problems I’m facing. To be honest, I think that 2020 will shape my professional disposition in medicine. With the growth in knowledge dissemination on the sociopolitical climate in this country, I have really come to see what is important in my life. Going into this application cycle, I was set on going to a school on either coasts. I was comfortable with those areas and knew they were diverse and exciting places because of the population density. However, with the systemic racism and list of other -isms that many groups face daily, I looked towards a school that, while incredibly tolerant, was amidst an area fairly limited in its knowledge on diversity and dare I say it, tolerance. I knew I could become a physician at any of the schools I had gotten into, but I felt I would be able to do more at CCOM by bringing my experiences in diversity and helping to educate a region of the country that does not have the same access to that knowledge. Therefore, I felt CCOM would be a place where I could still achieve my goals but also hopefully do something for the community as well. In addition to this reason, the pandemic was growing rapidly in populated areas where I was originally considering attending medical school.

As someone whose immune system is only sometimes functional, I had to consider my safety as well. Oh and the tuition benefits and scholarships were pretty great too. But all-in-all, I do feel like 2020 was a reality check for me to contextualize what matters to me. Attending Zoom university at CCOM has been difficult, but I have still managed to make friends, learn a lot (too much some would say) in my classes, and conclude that I have had a positive experience thus far in Iowa (although the derecho did threaten my first impression). As we get closer to a vaccine and we overcome this pandemic, I am sure we will all let out a sigh of relief and continue our medical education with greater fervor, especially as we start getting all the free food I’ve heard so much about.

About the Author

Zain Mehdi is a first year medical student at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine and is originally from Pittsburgh, PA. He attended college at Cornell University and completed a BA in Molecular and Cell Biology with honors and a BA in English.

The Appendix Journal sent out a call for submissions in the month of September regarding first year medical students’ experiences beginning medical school during the COVID-19 pandemic. First year medical students nationwide are experiencing an incredibly dystopian introduction into healthcare. Historically, no other cohort of medical or PA students has begun their careers during such a tumultuous time and we wanted to hear all about it.

I’m singing to the girl on the surface of the black fridge- reflected back in warm light from above and blurred by the wrinkled, cool surface. On nights I need to relieve my tension from the week, I send out into the universe Fiona Apple lyrics that seem to resonate with my twenty-four-year-old soul. When the pandemic first began, Italian cities would find community orchestrating music across balconies: on the 6th floor a retired opera singer, and an accordion player two blocks away, three windows down. So maybe if I just sing in my solitude someone else, somewhere, will share in it. 

I still can’t seem to wrap my head around the fact that I’ve started medical school during a global pandemic, hundreds of miles from my partner, family, and friends and amidst a country divided. On a number of occasions I’ve found myself calling my mom and asking once again- “Is this normal adulthood? Or is this an exceptionally tragic and challenging time?” I can’t help but feel like a child in those instances. 

When I was a child, my middle school teacher gave me a copy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Back then, I was quite proud to learn the word “endeavor” from it, but now I’m compelled to return to its pages as my own fingers tangle in the nerve plexus of human donors in anatomy lab: bundles of nerves I can see, hold and pull. The same cords which carry currents like live wires and electrify our organs and muscles. No human could have made this, only natural evolution over time: creating systems with structures so precisely calibrated and intricately connected that the odds of one tiny element being dysfunctional and leading to a cascade that prevents the entire body from working are astronomical. And yet here we are. 

But when things do go wrong in the body, it is only humans who can intervene. At the sides of my classmates, we discovered how one donor’s physicians had taken an artery off of the inside of the rib cage and sewed it onto the heart in order to bypass a blocked vessel and allow a new path for oxygenated blood to flow towards the tissues in need. We’ve seen how physicians can remove a lung lobe to prevent further spread of metastatic cancer and increase a patient’s lifetime. 

And so it is with taming the novel coronavirus, human mind and hand are required as the only species that can develop and implement a strategy to halt it. And yet we are also the only species that could assist it in propagating itself so far and for so long. With our refusal to stay in one place and need to interact with one another, we have eliminated the potential solution of burning the virus out as so many other viruses before it had met dead ends. But just as my medical training thus far has taught me that physicians need to meet patients where they are at, so too do we need to meet ourselves and each other where we are at: in the case of America, in our inability to properly socially isolate. It’s quite the paradox that our human need to socialize with one another has made us vulnerable to the virus and that it is our same human minds that will ultimately temper it.

Working in lab and lectures with my classmates and mentors clad in face-shields and facemasks gives me hope, however, in our ability as future healthcare professionals to put into practice now the discipline and dedication demanded in order to collectively preserve and restore health in our communities. It reassures me that with time and human resources, the day will come that I’ll come to discover the faces of my classmates, more than just their eyes, at a time in the future when PPE can be safely left behind in a corner at home. It helps me look forward to the day that I’ll be singing at an open-mic night, not to the reflection of my body in the fridge, my cold companion, but to friends and colleagues- solid-bodied, bare-faced, and electrified with life coursing through their nerves.

About the Author

Lola Lozano is a first year medical student in the Medical Scientist Training Program at the Carver College of Medicine.