In the poem “Points of Historical Interest,” set in April of 2021, the geriatrician Dr. Terry E. Hill reflects on the toll of COVID-19. The narrator sorts through positive and negative test results and grapples with the scope of the pandemic. The granularity of the data erases any trace of humanity. Patients are reduced to “age and zip code, coding for race, coding for home, nursing home, boarding home, group home, homeless shelter.” Searching for patterns, the narrator struggles to recreate the scope of these patient’s lives and losses from the scraps of information he can access. The final lines stuck with me: “Besides, the patterns are now past, previous, of historical interest only.”
“Are my memories of the pandemic also part, previous, of historical interest only? I consider this. I decide that I cannot let it be so.”
Reading this poignant poem, I was transported back to where I was in April of 2021. I was a critical care transport EMT in the California Bay Area, often transporting COVID-19 patients on ventilators between hospitals. The feverish days of the pandemic seem distant to me now. They slip away like fragments of a half-remembered dream. How easy it is to forget the whine of ambulance sirens, the hiss of my breath beneath a sweaty N-95, the red marks that the straps left on my face. How merciful it would be, to forget the crackle of my patients’ lungs! Are my memories of the pandemic also part, previous, of historical interest only? I consider this. I decide that I cannot let it be so.
On a sweltering day in August of 2021, I stood up and raised my right hand to swear a version of the Hippocratic Oath during our white coat ceremony. I commemorate this moment in my own journey in my studio art piece “White Coat Ceremony.” The short white coat settled about my shoulders, its seams scratching lightly at my skin, as I spoke the words: “I will remember those who came before, and those who will come after.” From that day onwards, I was a medical student. I thought of the patients I saw during the pandemic and the lessons they taught me. I promised to remember. I promised to take them with me.
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. Two of Tang-Tan’s poems, “Code OB" and "Pediatric Hemicraniectomy," appeared in the Spring 2024 Intima. Her Field Notes essay” Top Surgery” and artwork “White Coat Ceremony” appear in the Fall 2024 Intima.