Resident Physician Contributing Writer
University of Pennsylvania
Adrienne is a graduating fourth-year medical student at Georgetown who will be starting residency in general surgery at the University of Pennsylvania. She is interested in surgical oncology and is passionate about the role that palliative care can have for the multi-disciplinary care of oncologic surgery patients.
In an ideal world we would all die at home with our loved ones caring for us, slowly slipping away in our sleep into the placid beyond. But why doesn’t it happen this way? There’s a dignity to that way because of its organic simplicity. It’s how people used to die prior to modern medicine and before we started needing to always “fix the problem.”
Danielle Ofri, MD, PhD, is a physician at Bellevue Hospital, the oldest public hospital in country. She writes about medicine and the doctor-patient connection for The New York Times and her writings have been featured in the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Lancet, and on CNN.com and National Public Radio. She is the author of four books, numerous essays, and the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Bellevue Literary Review.
As students, most of us have heard about (or seen, as attendees in previous years) the raw emotions on display during Match Day. From sheer elation to disappointment, from intense displays to composed reactions, Match Day often showcases a wide spectrum of emotions.
Medical students quickly become familiar with residency match (“the Match”). Almost every attending and resident physician has interesting stories about his or her experience. These factors have helped tether the Match in student consciousness. But behind the massive collection of coverage, opinion, anecdotal stories (and lore), we students sometimes miss what a unique way it is to find our first jobs as physicians.
Given the wide array of adverse reactions that can potentially occur from taking medications, how much time should be spent discussing these side effects at the doctor’s office? Which possible reactions should be emphasized and which should be deferred?
One of the most difficult transitions a young medical student makes is the graduation from bench science and classroom learning to the clinical application of knowledge in the clerkship years of training. Wide-eyed and at times naïve, physicians in training wade, or are sometimes thrown headlong, into life on the wards. These young doctors-to-be are inundated with patient stories; they bear witness to hardship and loss as the patients under their care are often at their nadir.
Dr. Christine Montross is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior and the Director of Counseling Resources at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. Her first, Body of Work, is a thoughtful meditation on medical school anatomy lab, the history of dissection and our fascination with the human body. In Falling into the Fire, Dr. Montross recounts striking cases from her psychiatry training, and the paradox of diagnosis when ambiguity is so rife in medicine.
Over the course of residency and fellowship training, it’s likely that almost all trainees will encounter veterans through rotations at Veterans Affairs (VA) facilities. With mandates from Title 38 and long-standing relationships with academic institutions nationwide, the Veterans Health Administration plays a significant role in shaping the education of future medical professionals.
Our goal at in-House is to support writing as another such trajectory. We aim to help our colleagues “make things real” as they write them down in order to give substance to important moments and lessons in their work. If experience generates the questions we must live with, writing helps teach us how to best live through them.
Editor-in-Chief Emeritus (2015-2016)
University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine
Class of 2015, Internal Medicine Residency, Brigham & Women’s Hospital
