Medicine and Poetry

When I was in medical school, I remember listening to a poet bravely pour out her soul to us as we sat in our usual spots at Sackler Hall. She was dressed in all black with black combat boots and I remember whispering to one of my friends that she looked so hip. My friend questioned me, “Hip? She definitely has her own style.” It was the late 90s, early 2000s, so what struck me really was that this doctor did have her own sense of style and she stayed true to herself.

I remember a lot of things about medical school, mostly involving my friends and me supporting each other through it or the patients who helped me become the doctor I am today. But what I remember about the class lectures (the first two year of med school are non-clinical) involve anatomy class, the memorial we had for the patients who donated their bodies for our anatomy lab, a rheumatlogy specialist commandeering the lecture hall from her wheelchair, and this doctor reading her poetry to us.

While I might have been the only one out of the roughly 170 med students who remembers her, I like that this one doctor whose name I cannot recall has still left an impression on me.

Imposter Syndrome

Lately people have been talking about ‘Imposter Syndrome’. I think it’s tongue-in-cheek to place it in quotes as if it’s an imposter itself. It’s a catch phrase and I didn’t stop to think what it meant until I saw another physician talking about it on IG.

I can explain away all of my accomplishments in life. Like I was lucky to get into UCLA, I barely made it into the Creative Writing specialty in the English Dept there, SFSU just managed to accept my CW application to get my MA, I scraped by to get into med school off the wait list. I can add a million other tiny things, but it diminishes all the hard work I did to get there. Like even though I wasn’t pre-med in college, I still worked hard to get good grades in my Biology and other ‘pre-med’ classes that I took because I wanted to complete a science major too. (I doubled majored in Biology and English with a Creative Writing concentration because UCLA doesn’t let you minor in a subject.) And then I was lucky that I had taken all those classes because I had all my requirements for med school done.

Yes, I can definitely explain away all my accomplishments. Just like I brush off the fact that I still love to write. Or when Mini Me graduated and is acknowledged as a gifted writer—that’s ALL her—I will also downplay my part in helping her to become the writer that she is. She has natural talent, but Mr. Bookworm and I also nourished her love of reading and writing along the way.

Today I want to accept what I always say I am: a physician and a writer. And I want to thank that physician poet who inspired me when I was in med school. I hope she is still writing poetry, even as she makes a difference in her patients’ lives.