We stood in the supply room crying together. Megan* and I didn’t want to leave the basins, boxes of gloves, and gauze. No one would yell at us in there. We were on one of our Q3 call nights as third year medical students on our OB rotation. We had each just seen one of our first deliveries. She told me how her attending screamed expletives at her while she fumbled putting a glove over her different abled hand. I told her how my attending had slammed the instrument tray into me — it wasn’t an accident. We asked each other if it looked like we had been crying before we returned to the nurses station to watch the uterine and fetal heart monitors.
When I got back to my apartment, I called my mom, an OB/GYN who did her residency training in Boston in the early 1970s. “Was this what it was like for you? Is this medicine?” I asked.
About four years later, as a family medicine resident, I delivered a baby whose mother was one of my first continuity OB patients. The baby’s face reminded me of a rising full moon. I was living the family medicine dream: care for the mother and father as their physician, deliver their baby, then care for all of them. The abuse I experienced in medical school didn’t end in residency, but I was determined to create a different experience for the medical students I taught, my colleagues, and my patients, that was as far from the abuse of my training as I could.
I kept in mind my mentors — the ones who walked into a hospital room, sat down next to the patient, held their hand, and quickly knew not only their medical history but also their greatest loves and fears. And I remembered my mother’s gratitude in caring and advocating for her patients over decades. Yet I knew that a wider culture of patient-centered care (as well as training that nurtured reflection, human dignity, and dare I say, flourishing) needed more than a single doctor doing better.
I started to listen to a voice, one that had always spoken to me but was now growing louder. In medical school, the whisper encouraged me to study flamenco dance in Spain, sing in our medical school variety shows, and sign up for a painting class at the Art Institute of Chicago. In residency, the whisper urged me to sign up for a screenwriting and entertainment-education class. It rallied me to make a feature-length documentary film about music and health and study public health communications. By the time I was driving up the I-5 to move to Stanford with my husband, with our seven week old and two year old sleeping in the back seat, that whisper was a roar. It called me to meld medicine with the arts, to propel conversations toward human-centered care, and build empathy through the power of art and story.
