August 2, 2014

(Blue and Gold) White Coats

(Blue and Gold) White Coats 

If you have ever met me, I am pretty big on stories. So I’m going to tell a story about the day in the life of a Duke medical student.

I wake up every morning at 8:00am to the sound of blaring fire trucks. The only way to turn it off is to hit my alarm several times. After brushing my teeth, eating breakfast, and getting dressed, I make my way to my car to go to school.  The routine is practically a science. I park my car in Parking Garage 3 and make my daily fifteen-minute walk (also known as exercise) to the lecture hall.  Along the way, I pass the hospital lobby, where I am greeted by one of an ever-changing cycle of receptionists.

The people in and around Durham are amazingly friendly. Strangers have such interesting stories. Wearing a Berkeley shirt is practically equivalent to walking a dog around a park. Whenever I don on my Cal gear, someone always shout, “Go Bears!” or stop me to have a quick conversation. One such person I met during the beginning of the year was an elderly gentleman who was a Cal alum and his daughter was a medical student at Dartmouth. I was furnishing my apartment to be somewhat habitable and scrambling for a lamp so I could actually be awake past 8pm. What started as a 5-minute excursion to Target turned into twenty as we reminisced on our experiences back at Berkeley. To me, that is fascinating. Berkeley is such a highly-regarded and well-known institution, even in Durham. It still brings people together—Berkeley Alumni license plates are abundant in the Parking Garages and on the streets.

I usually stumble into the lecture hall with a few minutes to spare. If there is a mandatory event that day, I am usually relegated to a seat in the back row. The rest of my class is usually already there. My cohort consists of 113 of the brightest people I have ever met.  My class ranges in age 21 to 39 with the median being around 27.  A handful have already earned PhDs before coming to medical school, one founded an nonprofit organization in India tackling iron deficiencies with inexpensive nutritional bars that she developed herself, one was a Fulbright Scholar who did research in Switzerland, one traveled all the way from Uganda to be here with us, and one is a Julliard-trained world-class pianist. I’m sitting next to experts, leaders, and visionaries in lecture.

A fellow Berkeley alum and a DukeMed MSIV told me that since I am the only one from Berkeley in my class, I had the sole responsibility of representing Berkeley Engineering. At the time, I was flattered, but I’m beginning to understand the implications of what he said. To varying degrees, my time at Berkeley colors the way I discuss medicine with surgeons, the way I interact with my classmates, and the way I understand the course material.  Blood flow through vasculature are applications of Reynold’s Number and Bernoulli’s principle, the area underneath P-V cardiac curves translates to the amount of stroke work that the heart does with each beat, and deciphering EKGs is based on decomposing the electrical vectors of the heart; the list goes on and on. Even being associated with the entrepreneurial culture of the Bay Area has its benefits. I frequently have conversations with my classmates about topics such as venture capitalism and get invited to do start up challenges with them.

On Wednesdays, I usually have an additional commitment called Practice Course, where we wear our white coats and go into the hospital to record histories from patients. It is our weekly dose of humanism in medicine. The idea that there is a person behind the illness and that in itself is affecting the pathology. I enter the patient’s room clutching a small notebook and a syringe-shaped pen (I think it’s pretty funny), and ask the patient to recount their experiences.

One of my colleagues told me about how he wears a tiny golden bear brooch on his white coat. One of his most memorable days in clinic was when a patient actually started talking to him about it. To me, that’s fascinating. Our duty as physicians is not only to treat the ailments of patients, but also to learn their story and give them the ability to continue it. The fact that they graduated from Berkeley, or even know about it, is a valuable intersection point – where both of our stories overlap. We both sat in Dwinelle struggling through finals, laid down on Memorial Glade to catch our breath from the hectic schedule, or even stared at the Golden Gate Bridge during sunsets.

Berkeley is an extraordinary experience. You learn from some of the leading experts in the field and take classes with some of the brightest students in the country. When you graduate – you represent the number one public university in the world.  People will look to you for advice, knowledge, and insight, and it is up to you to deliver it. Strangers will become co-workers or even friends because of this common thread. You’ll meet other people who once called Berkeley their home. When you are feeling homesick, you’ll realize that that home travels with you wherever you go.

That’s why if you ever get the chance to see me sitting in a patient’s room scrambling to take notes about their present illness – you’ll see a small golden bear brooch placed on my white coat.

Neil Ray is a MS1, Berkeley alum, who is interested in the intersection between engineering and medicine.