"Change" by MSIH first year student Stephanie Sestito

Class of 2021's future female doctors!


On this week, last year, I received my acceptance to MSIH. I won’t bore you with my classic story of post-interview anxiety, subject line dread, or petrified email skimming. It was a wonderful day, in an otherwise terrible week. I was truly ecstatic.

The initial excitement, however, gave way to anxious analysis. Studying in Israel would mean leaving behind friends, family, my partner, my culture, and my favorite vegan donut shop1. In short, coming to MSIH meant experiencing change in nearly every aspect of my life.

For me, this wasn’t completely uncharted territory. After undergrad, I had joined the U.S. Peace Corps, and moved to Namibia for two years. There I’d experienced culture shock, language acquisition frustration, novel foods, and the hardship of maintaining relationships with loved ones at home. I knew what it was like to travel to a place that you’d never been before, and learn to call it home. As a person with no previous ties to Israel, I knew to expect the surprises, to come primed with flexibility and openness, and to pack a lot of coffee2.

In the end, the decision to come to MSIH was an easy one. While I was apprehensive about some aspects of the move, the benefits clearly outweighed my concerns. Coming to MSIH meant following my dream of becoming a truly global physician, learning the skills necessary to care for patients of diverse backgrounds, religions, languages, and cultural identities. I knew that studying medicine in this environment would challenge me, force me to grow in uncomfortable but important ways, and lead me to unique opportunities, relationships, and knowledge.

So far, all of my expectations have been met. I’ve tried new foods3, experienced the growing pains of learning a new culture, and been forced to come to terms with the realities of a long-distance relationship. And while I worried that some of those things might detract from my education, I am now continuously more certain that they will only contribute to my learning.
 
Reading the oath at the Physicians Oath Ceremony
Just over a week ago, I had the honor of taking the Physician’s Oath with the rest of my classmates. While we may have met just three months ago, these individuals have already become a support system, a sounding board, and a safety net. I have no doubt that throughout these next few years, we will grow to depend on one another even more.

At the oath ceremony, we were enraptured with the message delivered by Dr. Javeed Sukhera, a 2007 graduate of MSIH. He spoke about his own time in Beer Sheva, his medical training, and his struggle with maintaining a balance between his own empathy and the professionalism he felt was expected of him. He cautioned against the compartmentalization of work and self, and encouraged all of us to learn to manage our emotions – but never to stop feeling them. One line from his speech really stuck with me. He said, “You are a deeply flawed human being, just like those you are dedicated to serve. And only your authentic self can provide the understanding and compassion that they need from you.”

Coming to Beer Sheva has brought its fair share of headaches, as any international move is sure to do. But it’s been worth the struggle. Because I am confident that this is where I need to be to let my “authentic self” develop into a compassionate physician. And I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1 - check out @dottiesdonuts on Instagram to see why this was an important factor!
2 – Not because it’s completely unavailable, simply because I’m a coffee snob.
3 – Side note: hummus in Israel it is so radically different (and better!) than it is in the US that it counts as a new food. It may even change your life.

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