Trusting The Process: Preclinical Training During A Pandemic
Author: Ben Johnson, MS-II, Medical Student, University of Nebraska Medical Center
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Allison Ashford, MD, Program Director, Internal Medicine and Pediatrics, University of Nebraska Medical Center
As a first-year medical student, I did not keep up with what I naively thought would remain a contained public health crisis somewhere in China. My hands were full keeping track of normal pulmonary physiology. An emerging respiratory virus on the other side of the world was not on my radar. As the situation escalated, rumors began that we would not be able to finish the semester, that school would be canceled for a year, that the sky was falling. The uncertainty was frightening on a visceral, human level. As a medical student, though, how would this alter my training?
After finishing our pulmonology block in ordinary fashion, we received official word over our spring break that we would be doing remote learning upon our return. This more or less sounded like what I had already been doing. Up to that point I would wake up, do flashcards on my computer at home, watch lectures online at 2x playback speed and review lecture notes all afternoon. With the introduction of remote learning, that is still what my core study routine looked like. As COVID radically altered how most of us worked, learned, and interacted, for the most part, my experience was bizarrely familiar.
I was learning in a low-stakes environment, preparing, most immediately, to read vignettes and to pick a correct answer from a list of choices that were shown to me. Healthcare workers at my same institution were in an uncertain and high-stakes environment, learning on the fly to care for patients with COVID-19 so they could survive this novel virus and again see their families. As much as I wanted to help take on some of the responsibility they were so heroically shouldering, there were barriers to my contribution. Beyond the shortage of personal protective equipment, there were differences in our training that necessitated different levels of responsibility. As a pre-clinical medical student, I was not in a position to meaningfully contribute to the care of COVID patients or otherwise ameliorate the clinical burden facing healthcare workers. I felt my responsibility was to trust the process and dedicate myself to the remainder of my preclinical training in preparation for future clinical contributions.
By the time I began my third-year internal medicine rotation, we were a year into the pandemic. While it was far from over, the progress that the medical and scientific communities had made was evident. I had received both doses of my vaccine. The room that once stored reserve ventilators was again being used as a classroom for third-year medical students. What was once multiple floors of our hospital dedicated to the care of COVID patients had now become one. Our morning reports with residents and attendings included cases on patients with COVID-19 focusing on the interpretation of institutional treatment guidelines and the underlying research informing them. As a result, the opportunity that I had been anxiously preparing for since the beginning of the pandemic arrived somewhat anticlimactically.
In the course of a year, the world had been turned upside down by a pandemic that tragically took the lives of an unfathomable number of people. The period of time in which I spent hundreds of hours memorizing textbooks and lecture notes seemed to not exist at all. I don’t know if this is ordinarily the experience of medical students whose lives are enveloped by preclinical training but I felt as though I was transported through that time. On the other side, I arrived at a clinical training environment that had again been buttressed by experience and expertise. I am continually inspired by the efforts of those medical professionals who worked tirelessly, and I am grateful for the continuation of my training during that time that will allow me to soon join them.
Bloggers
