I am at the point in medical school that I can forget how strange a place the hospital is. Most days, I pre-round around 5am and I leave as the pink and gold of sunset reflects in the windows of the inpatient tower. I no longer smell the antiseptic that pervades the air. I write my notes oblivious to the announcements of “code blue” or “stroke team activation” playing over the intercom. When I walk through the hallways, there is purpose in my strides. The core clinical rotations that every medical student undergoes (family medicine, surgery, pediatrics, etc.) are a time for exploration and the forging of identity. We learn: This is how doctors act and react.
Now and then, I encounter a patient who shatters the delicate professional identity I am erecting around myself. I wrote a poem about the experience of responding to a “Code OB” during my obstetrics and gynecology rotation and seeing a nonviable, premature fetus delivered in the emergency department bay by a mother who did not know she was pregnant. This was an experience utterly beyond my understanding. I did not know what to say to the mother, who did not know she was to be a mother until mid-ambulance ride. In that moment, I was utterly adrift.
I read “Medical Metamorphosis”(Fall 2014 Intima, Field Notes) by Jessica Little, another trainee finding her footing within the alien world of the hospital. She is in the process of becoming one of the “resident-aliens,” who navigate the extraterrestrial world of the hospital with unnatural ease and do not flinch at the sight of blood or the parting of skin in the operating room. She describes a sense of incomplete transformation – of being initiated into the world of the “alien” surgeons while maintaining a foothold amongst patients and “earthlings.” In the end, she realizes the borders between the doctors and the rest of the world are far more permeable than any of us would like to admit.
“Medical Metamorphosis” narrates episodes that shook the narrator ( a second year medical student at the University of Virginia School of Medicine then) in ways similar to how the experience I relate in “Code OB” haunted me. I did not understand how to incorporate the anguish of what I had witnessed into my nascent professional identity. I am a medical student who is learning to become a doctor, but I have not learned how to meet the unseeing gaze of a dead fetus. I think I never will. — Angela Tang-Tan
Angela Tang-Tan is a third-year medical student at Keck School of Medicine of USC. She graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 2020 with a dual degree in Neurobiology and Psychology before becoming an ambulance EMT during the COVID-19 pandemic. She plans to pursue a residency in neurosurgery. Her poems, “Code OB” and “Pediatric Hemicraniectomy” appeared in the Spring 2024 Intima.