Survival and Sacrifice

A couple of my flippant Snapchats from this spring: My hard-won Match Day tickets to make sure my whole family could attend the big day; My caps from high school and undergraduate graduation, missing their doctorate companion.

I am a fourth-year medical student, on the cusp of starting residency. I have had a very unusual end to my education. I discovered where my first job as a physician will be while at home with my family instead of at the long-standing tradition of a “Match Day” ceremony. I won’t get a traditional graduation with a cap and gown, proud pictures, diploma handoffs, or quirky cakes. There have been a lot of sacrifices during this final chapter of my education, and I know I’m not the only person facing these disappointments. Yet I try remain grounded because they are a small sacrifice compared to the thousands of lives and livelihoods lost during this pandemic. 

Instead of finishing my last course studying obstetrical ultrasound in the hospital, COVID-19 restrictions forced me to choose an online course in order to graduate from medical school: enter Perspectives on Pandemics. I had no idea at the time that the anxieties produced by this course would rival those in my hardest medical school courses.

 In medical school we learn the why and how of human science and disease management. Classes move insanely fast and I basically guzzled information from a firehose for the last four years. The irony is not lost on me that now with a single class, one assignment standing between me and graduation, the quiet, time, and freedom have left me unsettled and antsy. To be nearly foiled by a liberal arts course where “all I have to do” is read, listen, and reflect seems ludicrous. But as Dr. Kyle Harper, Professor of Classics and Letters and Provost of the University of Oklahoma, said during this course, 

“Liberal arts are the kind of education Romans considered characteristic of freedom and a free person… the highest end of education wasn’t just the acquisition of skills that enable material success, but a sense of humanity, an important part of which is knowing who we are and those who’ve come before us and made the world that we inhabit.” 

Woman with smallpox with vaccinated infant. Source: National Museum of Health and Medicine, Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, Washington, D.C., Image NCP 32486.

So, I have continued to confront who I am, and during this course I learned more about who came before me and how they created the world I’m in. I learned from Dr. Andrew Wehrman, Professor of History at Central Michigan University, about the rise and fall of smallpox and how it applies to our current plague. Our ancestors’ toils to discover inoculation, then vaccination, stabilize my knowledge of vaccination’s benefits for my patients and its importance in healthcare moving forward. Their emancipation from smallpox, and how it required reporting, contact tracing, immediate vaccination, and follow-up monitoring for years, shows us the right way to defeat our own virus. Reflection on physician recommendations from centuries ago to provide free and accessible vaccination compelled me to solidify my own conviction that healthcare should be a right, not a privilege. History’s sacrifice of millions of humans to deliver this information should not be taken for granted, and I know I cannot ignore these lessons.

As I finish facing the hard truths of this course and my personal changes taking permanent root in light of this pandemic experience, I feel as the heroin Kirsten in Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven:

“…and if she weren’t so tired, if it didn’t take all of her strength to keep breathing in the face of Sayid’s terrible news, she could have told him what she knew: it is possible to survive this but not unaltered, and you will carry these men with you through all the nights of your life.” 

So maybe it is fitting after all, that the capstone course of my education on healing humanity is one that forces self-reflection and its imminent effects.