Post-post-baccalaureate

My brief, intense year at Johns Hopkins has come to an end. Can you believe it? As of a little over a week ago, I am an official applicant to medical schools for the entering class of 2015, meaning I have taken all of my prerequisite courses and the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT). Pretty exciting, huh?

Even though I was too busy to write about many of the memorable experiences that I had this spring, I did keep a little list of anecdotes that I wanted to share on my blog to help me jog my memory when the time came for me to sit down and write about them. Here are a few of the interesting experiences I had in the past few months.

Dr. Janice Henderson, the perinatologist with whom I did my clinical tutorial, invited me to accompany her to a book reading taking place on the Hopkins campus. Dr. Henderson spent some of her free time in the past few years completing a Masters degree in writing, so she is well connected with the literary community here at Hopkins. Together we went and saw Dave Andrews read from his new novel, My Father's Day Gift. It was a poignant moment to hear this author talk about the autobiographical parts of his book and his relationship with his dad. It was also really fun to spend some time with Dr. Henderson in a non-obstetrical capacity. She is a very talented woman with many interests, and it is enjoyable to see her in other areas where she shines.

Susannah and I pose with our strange, white masks.
We were told not to take pictures right afterwards. :)

I spent just over 24 hours in New York City on the first day of the pre-final exams reading period in order to see Susannah. I caught a bus up to the Big Apple and spent a really nice day up there with her. We had organized the trip awhile back since she and I had both long wanted to see a play called Sleep No More, which was supposed to be a pastiche of Shakespeare's Macbeth (a favorite of both Susasannah's and mine). Sleep No More refers to itself as an "immersive" theater experience, and by that they mean that the acting company rented an old hotel, made the entire thing into something akin to a haunted house (though with less meretricious decoration and more truly scary things, like an entire floor set up like a disturbing psychiatric hospital from the early 1800s and whole rooms dedicated to freaky taxidermy), and then had the actors, none of whom spoke, perform all throughout the hotel. If it sounds bizarre to you, I am describing it correctly. It was strange. All of the actors were dancers, so there were lots of lithe, coordinated movements in scenes only very loosely related to Macbeth being acted out. All of the spectators or "audience' members wore white masks with bill-like protrusions coming off the nose, which obviously added to the queer feeling of the place. You were free to wander around at will, which was both fun and slightly frustrating since you always felt like another, maybe more interesting scene was being acted on a different floor or in a different room that you were missing. My favorite scene from the "play" was a slow-motion scene that was perfectly choreographed. A panel of maybe ten actors sat up high at an elevated banquet table, all facing the open part of the room where we spectators stood. The lights were flickering constantly and loud, scary music was playing. The actors all slowly raised their glasses in a toast to each other, but then their actions became much more uncontrolled and grotesque. A bloody ghost (probably of Duncan or another person murdered by Macbeth) slowly crept behind the table. People at the table reached towards each other, made eye contact, kissed, threatened, or colluded in other ways, all in a beautifully timed slow motion scene. It was so well done. The entire immersive theater experience, however, was probably too weird for my taste. Shakespeare's power rests in his manipulation of and unprecedented knack for words, so to strip all of them away didn't work for me that well. But I am still very glad that I went, and getting to see Susannah was such a treat, too. As we normally do, we walked around, ate some good food, and enjoyed each other's company. We also spent the afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which was stunning.

A lamassu, a winged diety in a few
Mesopotamian cultures. Breathtaking!

The student group that I am a part of, the Conversations in Medicine Symposium, co-hosted one of our spring events with the Women's Pre-Health Leadership Society. Because that group's focus is obviously on women in medicine, the event that we hosted was an all-afternoon get-together in which prominent female doctors from the Baltimore and DC region came and spoke. Most of the afternoon consisted of rotating "break out" sessions in which the doctors stayed put and we participants were able to walk around and speak with the ones that interested us for periods of 20 minutes. The doctors that I met were so incredible! It was one of the most inspirational conferences I have ever attended. All of the women were so fascinating and bright, and the advice that they gave was great. I was taking notes at a mile a minute as I met a beautiful urological surgeon ("take one fabulous vacation a year to avoid burn-out"), an extremely sharp and warm pathologist ("ask your patients what they are looking for in a doctor and then go be that doctor"), a hilarious, not-what-you'd-expect plastic and reconstructive surgeon ("plastic surgeons are psychiatrists with a scalpel," "there is always more work or studying to do, so learn how to stop when enough is enough"), and other amazing people. It was a wonderful afternoon.

Unfortunately, I witnessed a small but upsetting homophobic interaction between two people walking ahead of me on the central quad of campus one day on my way to take an organic chemistry quiz. (Talk about a rough morning, right? No one should have to deal with homophobia AND organic chemistry all in the same morning. :) ) Incensed at myself for not catching up to the perpetrators and saying something in the moment, I vowed to do my part to rectify the injustice in some way. That afternoon, I quickly wrote a somewhat lengthy (not surprising, since it is me, after all) letter to the editor of the Hopkins weekly newspaper. The entire piece was accepted for publication that very next week, and you can read it here if you are interested. The best part about me being vocal and publishing my opinions is that multiple people reached out to me, some of them students that recognized me from classes, and one of them a staff member at Hopkins who has been with his husband for 21 years and who works here on campus. He sent me a heartfelt e-mail telling me that in the College of Engineering, where he works, colleagues talk about his marriage just like any heterosexual marriage and are just as enthusiastic about an upcoming gay wedding as they are for a straight wedding this summer. It was so heartening to hear his story and to have so many people reach out in support. I'm really glad that I stood up for myself, albeit a little late, and that I was received with love by so many people.

The First Aid merit badge

In order to prepare for all of the various components of the medical school application, we did lots of free-writing prompts and then multiple drafts of our personal statement, which is essentially an open-ended essay explaining ourselves, our life story, and our interest in medicine to prospective medical schools. Getting to spend time thinking really critically about these core questions and doing lots of writing about them was one of the biggest gifts of this past semester. I remembered interesting details from my past in the course of writing these responses, like how I saved my money to purchase a microscopy kit when I was a young boy (and then prepared a slide with my own blood on it after a knee scrape--ha ha) or how much I enjoyed earning my First Aid merit badge at Camp New Fork, my first Boy Scouts summer camp. I can never say that I always knew I wanted to be a doctor since I've wanted to be so many things from a young age through to early adulthood (e.g. Egyptologist, veterinarian, literature professor, and so on), but it was neat to see the early origin of some of my interests in medicine and to reconnect with them. It was also beautiful to get to reflect on all of the experiences I've had in my life and all of the amazing people who have been by my side to teach me, inspire me, or just make life fun and worth living. It ended up being a very spiritual and empowering experience to see my life from a distance, to realize how lucky I have been, and to see how much power I have to control the type of man and professional that I will become.

That is all for now. In my next post, I want to recount the stories of when my family came to visit me in Baltimore last weekend, which was so much fun. But that deserves its own post, so I will close this one with a "good night" and the happy news that I will definitely be writing again in less than 3 months now that I have my life back. :)