Grace Kennedy
University of Alabama Birmingham School of Medicine
No one really knows what medical school will be like until they get started, and it’s an experience that you can’t really understand until you are in it. It’s completely overwhelming and being fully prepared feels absolutely impossible. The analogy used during our orientation, “Med school is like eating ten pancakes a day,” goes like this. Every day you get ten pancakes, and you just have to do what you must to eat your ten pancakes every day. Every. Day. It may feel fun, new, and delicious at first, but as each day comes bringing another towering ten pancakes with it, you start to realize what a formidable task it truly is. And just as I was starting to get the hang of it--figuring out exactly which pancakes in medical school I liked and which pancakes I might want to settle on for my career--a viral pandemic comes along and adds so many pancakes I can no longer see my way forward.
Just months prior when I first heard about COVID-19, I knew my parents would be calling soon to get my hot take. I immediately went to look through one of the more popular video study guides we all use, Sketchy Micro. It features some light comedy with mnemonics to help us nail the infectious disease basics for our national board exams, and it has become a true staple in my studying. Today, however, like almost all of our current resources, the Sketchy Micro video for coronavirus is in need of a drastic update in the face a new pandemic and an unprecedented global health crisis.
Sure enough, I got a call from my father shortly after the news of the virus started to break. Like the doomsday preparer he was always meant to be, he had already started slowly amassing a pantry full of essentials: dog food for our sweet pups, rice, dried beans, chocolate, and so. much. soda. By mid-February, he had a bonafide stockpile. My mother, on the other hand, had found her own coping mechanisms by making plans to attend the major basketball tournaments (until they were canceled of course) and poking fun at my father’s panicked prioritization of peanut M&Ms over necessities like water and toiletries.
I feel frozen in time. Watching and waiting for the response from my family, my government, Twitter, and my medical school to make some sort of sense. I feel totally unable to prepare in any reasonable way. I’m simultaneously telling my father to relax and my mother to try to take things more seriously, and all the while I’m just sitting at home refreshing my Twitter feed and eating peanut M&Ms. I’m overwhelmed by what this might mean for my graduation timeline, my medical training, and my health. I’m scared, really scared, of being exposed and passing it on to my family. My father has his reasons for reacting in an over-the-top manner. With his history of congestive heart failure, he most certainly falls somewhere in the moderate-to-high risk category. I know I’m not alone in these fears, but I’ve also made a commitment to medicine. If not us, who will take care of our community members and our families in times like these?
I was on my family medicine rotation working in rural Alabama before I got pulled from my clerkships. The doctor I was paired with sees many patients who have no other options for primary care for miles. He catches up on their family news while getting a good physical exam and making sure they are up to date on their screening. The folks in this clinic had not seen anything like this, and everyone was very unsettled. Even in the early days, gloves, masks and testing were hard to come by, and with the flu season still going strong these items were desperately needed. I watched as this small clinic did everything they could to stay updated and enforce thoughtful protocols that would ultimately save lives. I’m proud to have been part of that team, and I’ll not forget my brief time spent with them on the frontlines in rural Alabama.
We’re living in the world of Twitter updates--constantly bombarded with new information in 20 second intervals while trying to understand what’s real and what it all means for ourselves. My medical school sends out emails with bombshell COVID-19 changes to plans and protocols with no warning, and I find myself refreshing my account incessantly for more updates. We are all finding new information from bizarre and sometimes unreliable sources – Twitter, Reddit, and anecdotally from fellow students. We obviously don’t know what’s to come. I keep expecting someone to be able to tell me, but of course, no one can. Medical school was never something I could have fully understood before starting, and this pandemic is no different. We just have to remember why we came here and take it one pancake at a time.