One Eighth

Image from Genes to Cells Journal, Volume 23, October 2018

The first time I held a heart, I was 13 years old and in my 7th grade life science class. My teacher was one of the coolest women ever to me – hilarious, didn’t let others walk over her, and ran a small farm with her husband – the heart was actually from one of the cows on her farm. It was huge, to say the least, 10 times the weight of a human heart. I remember being in disbelief that this thing in my hands was once beating inside of something else, was once the source of it living. Later in the week, she even let us hold fossilized dinosaur poop. Like I said, coolest woman ever. 

In high school, to the best of my memory, I then got the chance to hold a sheep’s heart and brain. There might even be an image of this floating around on Facebook somewhere but to be honest, I was so excited that I’m pretty sure I botched the dissection. 

Then came college and lab for biology 2, where you have to dissect a small fetal pig with your lab partner. Except for the fact that my partner was a staunch vegan –meaning I was dissecting all alone. You’d think that because of this extra work (that I honestly didn’t mind because I found it interesting) I would have been more prepared for our exams but unluckily for me our dissection quiz was the day after Halloween. I will not explain further.

I even worked in a rat lab all four years of college, experiencing things that I dare not write here for fear of what people’s reactions may be. I loved my rats, to be clear. 

However, none of this prepares you for being in the anatomy lab as a first year medical student. Nothing prepares you to be a breath away from the chest cavity of a cadaver as you struggle and strain your eyes trying desperately to visualize the order that the veins, arteries, and nerves are coursing in. Nothing prepares you to move a cadaver’s arms as you try to understand how the brachialis works, or to be fishing around to see the pronator quadratus, or to get a better view of the serratus anterior. But most of all, nothing prepares you to see a table with ten human hearts on it.

Different sizes, cut up or open in different ways, once beating but now being poked and prodded in hopes of uncovering their secrets.

You get to see what heart strings really are – they are real, by the way – and feel the instrument that is divinely equipped for its job of sending blood throughout the body. I am not religious, and if anything medicine often asks us to disconnect even more from those softer parts of ourselves as we pour over thousands of mechanisms and proteins and drugs, but when I stopped long enough in the anatomy lab to remind myself of what was going on, it did feel sacred.

One of the many reasons that I find medicine so fascinating is its long history; the reverence and wonder that I have for the human body has been shared by many for millenia. When I’m in the anatomy lab or learning a new latin word in class, I can’t help but imagine the person who first discovered that thing and the people before them who wondered but never found the answer. And though it may be 2025, I am no different than those unknowing explorers of years gone by – we’ve learned so much but there is still much, much more to be discovered. 

My first semester of medical school came and went faster than I had anticipated. It turns out that life moves pretty fast when you’re learning about 30 different bacterias for an exam, their signs and symptoms, the medications for them, the mechanisms for those medications, the contraindications, the list goes on. But I don’t want medical school to be remembered by the amount of information that I am learning –that’s a given when I signed up for this and also blurs out the more unique memories that I am making, the ones that I like to tell my friends outside of medicine and look forward to telling my future children.

Like the time that my friends and I went to the study rooms at three in the morning after a wine night or the time we sang ABBA in a karaoke bar even though I swore I couldn’t sing. The times people brought in Cuban coffee to share or sweets for the class. The time I fixed my friend’s botched haircut and realized that cutting my dad’s hair for years has proven useful to other people finally. The naps I’ve taken at my friend’s apartments, the meals we’ve shared together, the workouts they’ve pushed me to get stronger at. The times I’ve gotten cadaver juice on myself. The day that class was canceled because of a gas leak and we all piled into someone’s apartment, petting her cats and sharing empanadas as we delved further into biochemistry chaos. The time I went to my first rave and of course ended up at the First Aid tent and turned 26 with my classmates singing Happy Birthday. The time I went camping and swam in a Florida spring for the first time and learned how to change a flat tire. The time a woman cried and hugged me while I was volunteering at Doctors Without Borders because the numbers I had her read for an eye exam turned out to be the date of her daughter’s passing.

It’s difficult to look back at the semester and realize how fast time passed me by, how many days I went without reaching out to people I meant to, and how long it had been since I had last written. It’s cliche at this point to say that I never want to lose myself to medicine but it’s true; besides the fact that I care deeply about my hobbies and my relationships, being a doctor is not like being a mad scientist, you need to stay connected to your humanness in this profession if you hope to be a compassionate physician that can relate to your patients.

Much of my winter break has been spent knocking on wood as I tell people that I’m genuinely happy with how school and my life is going currently. It was only earlier this year that I still didn’t know if I was going to be in school or not, freaking out internally everyday and pacing back and forth as I tried to imagine a life without what I had dreamed of for years. In another life, had I had to go down another path, I like to think that I would’ve done just fine. My dad likes to say that I’d be happy as a garbageman so long as I could create meaning behind the work. He may be onto something, but I’m quite grateful to be where I am everyday. Even when it means I’m getting dangerously close to getting my hair in a body cavity or accidentally looking at the nastiest flashcards in the world in public. Just please, no one ask me for medical advice yet –unless it relates to ibuprofen vs acetaminophen or you’ve gone spelunking in the Ohio River valley and suddenly feel unwell.