"Take Action" by MSIH First Year Student Jensen Reckhow

Hello! I’m Jensen. I tend to have a lot to say, but I’ve had a really hard time writing this post. I imagined using this space to reflect on how my experience at MSIH thus far has been fun and funny and challenging and supremely delicious, but it seems disingenuous today. So, this post is going to be a little different.

The world is a scary place right now. I have never felt so far away from home, nor so unsure of how to be useful. There is so much to do and I can’t help but feel stuck: my Skype credit is hurting from how often I call my congresspeople, I am doing what I can to connect people to resources from afar, and the small bit of savings I had stashed away is being put to use by organizations I care about.

At the end of the day, though, I’m just sitting in front of a computer.

I think all medical students grapple with this dilemma, no matter what is happening around them. Most of us are here because we are motivated by human interaction, because we want to understand people, and to support them in becoming agents of their own health. We came to MSIH because of its unique commitment to global health, which is really just a reaffirmed commitment to understanding our patients as people: appreciating the social, political, economic, and cultural context of each patient is essential to providing good medical care anywhere. It’s just most obvious when you come from different backgrounds. Yet for a group that claims to be so people-oriented, we spend most of our time in our rooms, in the library, reading, writing, silent.

Well, not really. This may be a traditional narrative, but my classmates here have shown me time and time again that it doesn’t have to be like this (and, in fact, it isn’t). Outraged by limited access to reproductive services? Volunteer in the obstetric emergency department. Assist a woman as she gives birth to her child, and help provide the information and tools they both need to be healthy. Concerned that a person’s political status affects their access to healthcare? Visit a refugee or asylum seeker in the hospital to remind them that they are not alone. Help them practice English, Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, so they can more easily communicate their needs and desires. Want to combat cultural misunderstandings in your community? Organize an event to teach your friends about your traditions, your food, your songs.


The ways in which we support our patients and communities will undoubtedly evolve as we progress through our careers, but our habits of engagement are developing now. Most of us are far from home, and we do spend a lot of time in front of our computers. Yet we can, and do, and must, make the time to put our skills to use as we acquire them. So, team: Study, then get up. Take, and then give back.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"A World Outside of MSIH" by rising second year student Chelsea Powell

Image
You may have heard that all medical students do is study.   It certainly seems that way at times.   There are, however, opportunities to fit in some other experiences. Here are a few of the things I have done this year:      I’ve always liked to run, and the endless desert trails in Beer Sheva provide great places to train.   In November my roommate and I decided it would be great fun to run the Tel Aviv Half Marathon , scheduled for February.   What seemed like such a good idea when we registered in November, however, became a source of stress as the February date approached, because we realized that the race fell on the day before a pharmacology quiz.   Fortunately, we were able to come up with a creative solution to our loss of study time.   While other runners wrote split times on their arms, our arms sported names of the drugs we needed to memorize.   I suspect we were the only runners in the race who quizzed each other about COX ...
Read more

"Loving the Alien" by MSIH first year blogger Flear Vaknin

Image
In recent years, the practice of referring to someone as an ‘alien’ has been contested by articles in the New York Times (“Time to Retire the Term ‘Alien ’ ”), Salon (“Stop Calling People Aliens”), and Immigration Impact, to name a few sources.  One of the definitions of the term, from the Oxford English Dictionary includes “unfamiliar and disturbing or distasteful,” so it is not surprising that many are calling for the abolishment of this term when referencing people. But then there is the pregnant alien of Bialik street in Beer Sheva: cartoonish, endearing, and a little odd, but more inviting than off-putting. Before seeing her for myself, I heard others refer to this pregnant alien and believed her to be a sculpture that was merely reminiscent of what was being described (something more abstract perhaps). When I happened upon her on a walk, I was thrilled to find out that, first, I am living in a city with a sense of humor, and that maybe this is the sort of place where being ...
Read more

"Think" by MSIH first year blogger Ayal Levi

Image
This little statue is called "The Thinking Man."  My (future) mother-in-law bought it in Uganda, then passed it over to me as a present, before I joined the rest of this inimitable group here in the Desert. Now, he sits on my desk, eyes half-shut, staring at me. He never stops staring, this “Thinking Man.”  He certainly is consistent; I’ll give him that. As we spend considerable hours together, trying to find our way through a waterfall of information, he has become a constant reminder to stop and think. To pause, shake my head, and work through the intricacies of acid-base metabolism, the autonomic nervous system drugs, and what feels like a black-hole of microbiology “Slow it down there sparky, and use your head.” Or something to that effect. A classmate of mine, a sort of philosopher-king, quoted me a short line from a letter Oscar Wilde wrote to Lord Alfred Douglas (complicated relationship). “Education is  the ability to play gracefully with ideas.”  What a grea...
Read more