Vanessa Van Doren is a current internal medicine resident physician in Georgia. She started her career as a primatologist but eventually found her way to clinical medicine. She plans to pursue an infectious disease fellowship with a focus on HIV. Sh… — Vanessa Van Doren is a current internal medicine resident physician in Georgia. She started her career as a primatologist but eventually found her way to clinical medicine. She plans to pursue an infectious disease fellowship with a focus on HIV. She lives in Atlanta with her husband Dan and their cat Beau. Her Field Notes essay “The Right Choice” ***appeared in the Fall 2020 Intima***.

“Growths” (Fall 2020 Intima) is about the ways physicians have found a measure of peace during the early days of the COVID-19 crisis by Cecile Yama, a pediatric resident in the Bronx. The essay resonated with me as the counterbalance to the resident physician experience inside the hospital I described in “The Right Choice.”

Even before the pandemic, the grueling hours of residency left little time for a life outside of it. Once residency starts, your work responsibilities expand astronomically, leaving little room for other aspects of a normal human life: relationships, interests, time alone, time to take care of basic needs. As Dr. Yama describes, “Any ounce of creativity is usually pounded out of us in medical school, or re-directed, and we start to learn that our time does not belong to us; it belongs to our careers, to our patients.”

Your humanity is whittled away little by little as you are shaped into the “efficient machine” that is needed to complete the superhuman tasks of 80-hour workweeks and 30-hour shifts, of at times being the only doctor covering over 100 patients, and other seemingly impossible, high-stakes tasks. I remember mourning this as an intern and wondering if the parts of me that I put on the shelf would still be there where I finished training. I felt stripped of my humanity at the time I needed it most.

When your whole life and sense of self-worth centers around your work in the hospital, the futility and unpredictability of facing off against a deadly new virus with no treatment options is especially devastating. In those early days, it felt like no amount of individual efficiency, research, effort or brilliance had any effect on the death toll of our patients. We had no tools to manage the situation we faced, and so we had to invent (or remember) them. As Dr. Yama describes, the only way to make this situation livable was to try and dust our humanity off the shelf, even as the time we had to devote to it was further compressed. I noticed this among my co-residents, too; a surge in advocacy, book clubs, narrative writing workshops. The need to anchor ourselves with a sense of purpose.

For patients, too, I think that spending time on these things by talking about their lives outside of the hospital is “insisting on something more beautiful than the lives we were living” in the same way that planting seeds is for Dr. Yama. We all need to be mentally pulled out of the hospital—to remember ourselves as full humans, not just patients and providers.

NOTE: Click on the title of the works mentioned to download PDFs.

Vanessa Van Doren is a current internal medicine resident physician in Georgia. She started her career as a primatologist but eventually found her way to clinical medicine. She plans to pursue an infectious disease fellowship with a focus on HIV. Her non-fiction essay “The Right Choice” appearsed in the Fall 2020 Intima.