Angela Tang-Tan is a third-year medical student at Keck School of Medicine of USC. Two of Tang-Tan’s poems “Code OB" and "Pediatric Hemicraniectomy" appeared in the Spring 2024 Intima. Her Field Notes essay “Top Surgery” and Studio Art piece “White Coat Ceremony” were just published in the Fall 2024 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine.
Every now and then, at the end of a call shift, I leave the hospital with aching feet and heavy eyelids. And then I remember: I am the lucky one. I am the one who gets to go home. My patients – the grandfather whose kidneys are failing, the ten-year-old with meningitis – are not so lucky. They will not go home tonight. They may never go home again.
The primary impression that the beautifully written non-fiction piece “On Call” by Lainie Holman conjures for me is exhaustion. The author is a pediatrics intern on a brutal call shift. Over the course of the night, she finds herself stretched to the limit caring for multiple sick patients in rapid succession. She attends to the death of a terminally ill child with liver failure but has no time to process what just happened, as she must fill out death paperwork, prepare for morning rounds, complete a day of post-call clinic and then head home to cook dinner for her own children. Her emotional and physical expenditure is profound. Her vision blurs and contracts to what is immediately before her.
I caught the briefest glimpse of that feeling while on overnight call on my neurosurgery rotation as a third-year medical student. The night of the Fourth of July was a whirlwind of consults, depressed skull fractures, and EVDs. The morning after the tragedy described in my poem “Pediatric Hemicraniectomy,” I walked home to my on-campus apartment in a torpor. Exhaustion put the world into soft focus. As I walked, I watched dawn set the city of Los Angeles alight. The sky turned to the cerulean blue of a California summer that beckons children outside. That pristine light shone from each pane of the hospital’s windows. And for a moment, I thought not of how my back throbbed, but of how privileged I am to stand and witness the world awaken to a new day. I knew of a seven-year-old boy who was not so lucky.—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 Studio Art piece “White Coat Ceremony” were just published in the Fall 2024 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine.