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ART & MEDICINE

and empathy to the patient and his family.
After finishing the stitches, I watched him discuss a plan of
treatment with the resident. I stared, amazed by their speed. I
mentioned to him how it felt like I was wearing a costume and
putting on a charade.
“I think it’s always like playing dress up,” he said, smiling,
“it’s impossible to know everything, but it is always possible
to care.”
Those words serve as a mantra for me. I think it is relatively
easy to sink into a sense of nihilism in medical school. Every-
day I go to school excited to learn and come back confused
by a new system. I came to medicine, in part, because I loved
understanding the science —the why and the how of our bod-
ies. It was a field where the uncommon act of looking within
a body and understanding its workings became second nature.
That fascination with science becomes difficult to maintain
when I am knee deep in a metabolic cycle and every step has
a disease and drug associated with it. However, whenever I
think “What am I even doing here?” I think of the girl in the
high school clinic who is fighting to become a doctor. When
I hear the thuds of helicopters as I study, I think of my father.
I remember: I came to medical school to become capable. I
came to help to relieve suffering. I came to become the physi-
cian that comforted my mother on the worst day of her life.
Nothing about learning or applying medicine happens
overnight. I remind myself of that each time I watch older
students and doctors interact with patients. They felt the same
way I do, and they fought to get to where they are today. Ulti-
mately, my white coat was not boasting of knowledge, but one
promising service.
It has been quite some time since that first day at the clinic.
With more practice, I am less worried about “the charade” and
more patient with myself. Every so often I catch my reflection
in a window and pause. My white coat has lost its stiffness and
I wear it with less hesitation.
More and more, I look like a doctor. In those moments of
reflection, I reconnect to the person I was when I started that
very first day; standing in front of the mirror, sure of nothing
else but my determination to serve.

Roshni Grace Ray is a first-year medical student at the Long School
of Medicine. She is honored to have received the On Being a Doctor Writ-
ing Award for this essay from the Texas Chapter ACP Medical Student
Essay Competition in November 2018.

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