Despite doubts and hurdles, why medicine is a calling for Penn Med student
Editor's note: We're coming up on the third Friday in March, which, if you are one of thousands of American medical students, is a very big deal. It's Match Day, when these future doctors find out where they will be spending the next few years of their lives in the next phase of training, the residency. We asked Rebekah D. Lucien, a student at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania to write about the path she has taken to Match Day.
“Welcome to the one place where you don’t have to apologize for loving adolescents.” With this introduction to the 2014 Society of Adolescent Health and Medicine conference, I immediately knew I belonged.
I graduate from medical school in two months. Friday is Match Day at the University of Pennsylvania, the day I'll learn where I go for residency, the next step in my career.
The usual reply I get when I say I want to work with teens is this: “God bless you!”
In middle school, I had few friends and activities outside of school. I felt isolated for the first time in my life. "What would the world be like if I wasn’t here?” I wondered. "Would I be missed?”
Like a lot of young girls, I struggled with feelings of low self-worth. I coped by trying not to think about my loneliness. Instead, I imagined a perfect future, complete with popularity, academic success and a career as a doctor.
Externally, I appeared successful and well-adjusted; even my parents did not learn until years later that my apparent ambition was my way of compensating. With time, I learned to find joy in myself and every life stage. But I never forgot how sad and alone I felt. That experience inspires me to create spaces for adolescents to talk about their emotions and get them connected to supportive resources.
In 2009, my younger sister was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Through chemotherapy, radiation, and two bone marrow transplants, she fought fiercely against cancer -- and sometimes her doctors -- to be a normal teenager. She wore a Scooby Doo onesie in the hospital for Halloween and rushed from tiring chemo sessions straight to basketball games. She had to miss the fall semester of her senior year of high school because of being immunocompromised, but she insisted on attending her Homecoming dance.
I can only imagine what some of her doctors and nurses thought. Still, she stated her case and got medical approval to go to the dance. She looked fabulous, even with a wig and a line for infusions in her arm.
My sister reminded her health care providers that patients' values and their sense of self matter. She taught me to ask my patients what they want, and create a plan that honors them as well as I can.
When I started college, academic counselors advised us to "do what you love." This posed a real problem for me. I knew I wanted to be a doctor. I did not, however, love organic chemistry. Fortunately, my father, who is a pediatrician, assured me that these basic requirements were only the foundation of medical practice. He kept me focused on my dreams by sharing his own experiences overcoming challenges. "You only need one thing to become a doctor: perseverance," he told me over and over. I might have given up without his example and encouragement.
I resolved to see each class as a hurdle to jump on the way to my finish line. To remind myself, I carried a picture of myself as a toddler in child-sized scrubs, placing a plastic stethoscope on my older brother’s chest.
In medical school, courses focusing on individual organ systems did not excite me either. I view every patient not as, say, a diabetic, but in concentric circles of contexts. I look at genetics, family, community, environment, and even history in order to understand how these factors impact their health.
Early on, this way of thinking made me question if I had chosen the right path. Was there a place in the medical field for someone who thinks like me? Yet again, I felt out of place.
Even so, medicine still felt like a calling. Thankfully, I had mentors to reassure me that my holistic approach to care would not only be appreciated, but also expected, in the future.
I hope my story reminds other future doctors that the work, though hard, is worth it. Relying on my faith and the support of my family and friends, I persevered despite numerous doubts and will start residency in pediatrics in June. The medical field needs physicians with different interests and perspectives and I am honored to be among them.
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