“Am I becoming / something unfamiliar?” asks Lauren Fields in her poem “My First Mask Was a White Coat” and in that simple question she brings back for me the struggle of becoming. With our first medical school clerkships we don white coats and mimic our preceptors: some false confidence here, a prayer for invisibility there. Silent reassurances never spoken aloud: It’s okay to pretend at doctoring. That’s how you learn.
To patients I learn to say it out aloud: I am a medical student. And so commences Act I, in which I play the part of doctor as convincingly as I can, conjuring the few primary care physicians I have shadowed as I embody my role so completely I actually believe I could be the person I impersonate. Is there any other way?
In my memoir excerpt “Touch: a Surgery Rotation” I play understudy to doctors I am less sure I want to emulate. This is Act II: In the hustle of abscess rounds and surgical emergencies, stripped of my name and identity, I see myself copying a hardness I don’t recognize. As Lauren Field writes,
“On rounds, names become
numeric, identifiers
saying nothing
of life or story, dim beacons
of a vanishing objective,
and this feels like the last moment
I will notice the shift.”
Like so many medical students before me, I give in. I rush around the wards and do as I am told and become a cog in the churning machinery of admission-intervention-stabilization-discharge, trying to justify my inability to connect with patients, becoming someone altogether unfamiliar.
But they still affect me. I cannot cure their drug addictions. I learn something else from them: how to escape. Here is the third Act, in which the medical student teeters on the brink of surrendering her humanity.
What distinguishes healers from our patients, I think now, is how we approach the daunting task of staying present. The skilled actor does this well: hones attention on one person at a time. Pretends there is no chorus, no nefarious subplot, no impending tragic end. So much rides on dialogue, on connection, on getting the story right—and on realizing every moment offers meaning, if one is paying attention.
Claire Unis enrolled in the University of San Francisco’s MFA program at USF while in medical school at UCSF, where she focused on writing memoir and narrative nonfiction. Now a practicing pediatrician, she also leads Literature in Medicine classes for other clinicians in one of the largest medical groups in northern California. Four other excerpts of her memoir about her experiences in medical school have been published elsewhere, two in anthologies, along with several essays and poems related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Find more about her work on Facebook @LiteraryArtinMedicine (Claire Unis MD MFA) and on www.claireunis.net. Her essay “Touch: A Surgery Rotation” appears in the Spring 2021 Intima.