The Beginnings of Fall Semester

First of all, I apologize that this is the first time I have written since the beginning of the semester. It feels like a lifetime of things have happened since then, but I suppose I have been too busy living my life in order to document it. Please excuse the catch-up.

To be somewhat chronological in my narrative, let me tell you first what happened at the end of summer but before school started. I spent some time with those of my friends who were back in Baltimore during the weekend before school began. One friend of mine, Chris, and I went to get some ice cream along one of the hip avenues here in Baltimore, and as we were strolling along, we noticed a high concentration of police cars and a police helicopter, which is out almost every night in Baltimore, shining its light directly in front of us. A hysterical woman walked past us talking to her boyfriend about seeing a knife, and we realized that we were in the middle of some kind of police chase! We quickly went to our car and decided to eat our ice cream somewhere locked and indoors. Baltimore is, unfortunately, not nearly as safe as Portland, Oregon or Laramie, Wyoming!

Anna and I overlook part of Baltimore up at Druid Hill
Park.

Another friend, Anna, and I have been growing really close. The weekend before school started, she and I went for a long bike ride around Baltimore and ended up finding a park with a beautiful reservoir and a nice view of Baltimore's downtown. After our ride, we stopped at a coffee shop for a blueberry buttermilk froth, which was as tasty and bizarre as it sounds. We talked about our goals for the semester, how excited we were to be back in Baltimore, how our summers had been, and everything in between. I felt so close to her and so enthused for the semester. It was a beautiful afternoon of internal peace and a strong sense of connection to an amazing person. I couldn't have asked for more!

Two other really fun times with people in my program stand out. For one of them, I biked downtown with my friend Joey, enjoyed the nice view of the downtown area and harbor, and then went to the American Visionary Arts Museum, which is a museum that houses the avant-garde, eccentric artwork of people with mental health disorders, people who are incarcerated, or people who were just generally considered to be ahead of (or behind) their time. We saw things like an exhibit all about farts (which satisfied my inner twelve-year-old to no end!) to intense, apocalyptic paintings with imagery and words from the Book of Revelation. It was certainly an experience not to be forgotten, and it was fun to spend more time with Joey.

Ladies and gentleman, I present to you Baltimore's
downtown and inner harbor!

Lastly, I've been growing really close with a guy in my program named Tim and his roommate, Noah. Tim reminds me of Shelby in many ways, which is part of why I felt so close to him right away. In my personal life, I had been thinking a lot about my friendships with straight men and how, even though I value them tremendously, I sometimes withdraw from them since I worry that straight men will have an adverse reaction to me as a gay man. As part of personal growth, I encouraged myself to reach out in a natural, Bob-style way to some of the guys in my program who have reached out to me in their own ways in the past. To that end, I had Tim and Noah over for a dinner of sweet potato and black bean enchiladas (with salsa, Spanish rice, and arroz con pollo to compliment/complete the meal) that I made. We ate and talked late into the night, laughing and sharing so deeply, and it was amazing. After that dinner, all three of us have grown closer, and it feels really good to have guy friends on whom I can lean and with whom I can be fully myself. In general, I am so grateful for the people in this program and for how inspirational, brilliant, and amiable most of them are. I feel so fortunate.

Though a low-quality photo, it at least shows the entire class
eating together. I'm with the rest of the guys in the back right.

The Friday night after our first week of school, the post-baccalaureate premedical program hosted a "welcome back" dinner at an iconic city restaurant, Cafe Hon. I got a delicious plate of crab cakes and enjoyed talking with the people that I had begun to grow close to in the summer. After dinner, we decided to go dancing at a a once-a-month event at Baltimore's Lithuanian Hall, a strange private club in Baltimore that hosts a large dance party the first Friday of every month. We danced our little butts off, knowing that that weekend was probably the last one where we could afford to stay out late and sleep in the next day. At the dance, as I was jamming with some of my friends, I noticed that John Waters entered the club. Yes, the same John Waters that directed Hairspray! I confirmed that this was him with one of my Baltimore-native friends, and she told me that, indeed, he often came to the Lithuanian Hall. Believe it or not, just a couple of days later, as I entered a chic movie theater to see what times it was playing the One Direction movie, I ran into John Waters again! I tried hard not to gawk and look totally starstruck, but I'm sure he noticed how flabbergasted I was. Being from Wyoming, it is so rare and cool to me to run into such high-profile people like John Waters! I guess I'm really not in Kansas anymore.

John Waters is almost impossible to miss, with his
characteristic pencil moustache and his tall, slight frame.

My clinical practicum in maternal-fetal medicine (or, in less lofty words, the time I spend each week shadowing Dr. Henderson, an OBGYN who did a fellowship in maternal-fetal medicine to become a perinatologist) is one of my favorite parts of each week. I have had some of the richest, most motivational experiences under her tutelage. I have shadowed her multiple times in a "nutrition in pregnancy" clinic that she started for her obese, high-risk obstetric patients. Seeing how well she engages with her patients has been so inspirational. She started this clinic because she wants to pay more than lip service to preventive medicine and because she wants to do her part to eliminate racial and socioeconomic disparities. She's an amazing woman. I have also been able to shadow her a few times on Labor and Delivery, and those are always my favorite days. I got to check out a clean pair of Hopkins Hospital scrubs and then follow Dr. Henderson as she does rounds on admitted patients and helps women give birth. I have witnessed two deliveries to date, and both were such powerful, unforgettable experiences. I will admit that I got a little teary-eyed at the first one because of how overwhelming an experience it was. Being an obstetrician looks like such a privilege, and getting to tie the surgical mask on one and hold a woman-in-labor's legs (which I got to do during the second birth!) is equally great!

Dr. Henderson also walks for a couple of hours with the greater Baltimore community on Wednesday evenings, and I have joined her for that twice since she and I live not even 5 minutes apart from each other. (Incidentally, Dr. Henderson drove me by John Waters' house on her way to dropping me off, and he is just 3 minutes from her! I live in a pretty awesome neighborhood, if you can't tell. And John Waters is becoming a theme of my life here in Baltimore.) The walk is always a fun time to meet and mingle with new people. One guy, an MD/PhD student named Matt who researches with Dr. Henderson, has become a friend and role model to me. I am surrounded by amazing people here in Baltimore. Every time I'm finished shadowing Dr. Henderson, I feel so full of energy and excitement for the future. However, when I attend conferences with her (like two I went to last week, one on neonatal alloimmune thrombocytopenia and the other on twin anemia polycythemia syndrome), I also realize what a long, arduous road I have ahead of me. But I'm loving it so far and have no plans to derail this train!



I love this comic and find it hilarious yet true, since I am enrolled in a math course, physics course
and lab, chemistry course, and a biology course and lab all simultaneously and experience
the interrelatedness of them all yet also the constant arguments over how "hard" or
"pure" one branch of science is over another.

I won't speak about my academic course too much other than to say how much I am loving it. I thought that this year would feel a little bit more like "work" and that I would have a difficult time connecting my studies to my reasons for wanting to become a physician, but I have been pleasantly surprised to learn that I am finding almost all of the material I'm learning riveting. My favorite class is organic chemistry because all of the small pieces of information in the subject add up to explain so many fascinating chemical phenomena. It's hard to explain to someone who hasn't taken the course, but it's kind of like playing a really complicated game with lots of rules that allow you to rearrange atoms, molecules, and bonds. I'm also loving biology since it applies the chemistry we have learned so well and explains so many interesting things about living systems. The applications to medicine are totally direct, especially as we learn about cell structure and function, various macromolecule structures (lipids, proteins, nucleic acids, and carbohydrates) and so forth. Physics, which I was anticipating hating, is actually becoming more and more fun. The professor we have is incredible (ponytail, nasal voice, obsessed with physics, and only ever uses his 4 children in his example word problems and on tests), and I love how physics addresses the most fundamental questions and concepts of the entire universe. It's a more stimulating discipline than I ever imagined based on my rudimentary, crude introduction to it in high school. Calculus II is great, like I was hoping it would be given how much I loved calculus I, and Introduction to Clinical Medicine is also a highlight of each week since it is a physiology course taught by MD faculty at the School of Medicine. I couldn't be happier with my program, and my only complaint is that the sheer volume of classes and work to be done perpetually exceeds my ability to do it, which can be exhausting and stressful at times.

Let me just mention a few other neat things that have happened in my life over the past 6 weeks. I have been privileged to attend two events hosted by the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, the first a conference about healthcare and homelessness, which is a topic that I feel passionate about after working at Outside In when I lived in Portland. The second event, the Henrietta Lacks Memorial Lecture Series, was a fascinating symposium in which various people spoke about the impact of the HeLa cell line and Henrietta Lacks, the poor black woman who died of extremely aggressive cervical cancer in the 1950s and whose cells, taken without her knowing here at the Hopkins Hospital, are so proliferative that they have been used in scientific experiments all around the world. For anyone interested, I recommend the book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a New York Times bestseller that tries to humanize Henrietta and explain the broad impact of her cell line. I haven't finished it, but the narrative is quite gripping, and it is all more real to me since Johns Hopkins was the place where she received gynecological care and, unfortunately, where her cells were taken from her unwittingly.


I am the post-baccalaureate premedical representative to a group on campus called the Conversations in Medicine Symposium. We are a group of students that bring in high-profile doctors to speak about relevant issues in healthcare. We had our first event, which was a major success (thanks in part to the delicious Italian food that we got catered!), and have another coming up in just two weeks. The upcoming events for this semester will feature Dr. Martin Makary, a surgeon whose work on developing a surgical checklist gained tremendous fame in Atul Gawande's Checklist Manifesto, and Dr. Deborah Persaud, who just wrote me yesterday agreeing to speak to us about her research and clinical work in which she helped to cure the first case of pediatric HIV infection, landing her a spot as one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people. The Conversations in Medicine Symposium has been so neat, and being at a school known for its medical experts makes Hopkins the perfect place to be for this kind of symposium!



The Conversations in Medicine Symposium committee members. Yes,
I am about a head taller than all of these adorable, hard-working
undergraduates. :)

Much more has happened, but this post is long enough! I will try to write again sooner next time, but free-time being at something of a premium, my next update might be once the semester is over! Wish me luck, and know that I love and miss all of you.