“The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease” - Sir William Osler

I don’t want to be a doctor. I need to be a great doctor.

November 2009: I was sitting on my favorite bench on campus in the middle of fall, just a few weeks shy of my 19th birthday. I was your typical neurotic and flustered premed, but I was happy and excited to conquer undergrad. But there was one little problem: the handfuls of blood I would cough up at night. My roommate at the time (who is still one of my close friends!) threatened to call my mom if I didn’t go to the doctor immediately. So I went.

At my primary care physician visit we reviewed my X-rays. She talked a lot, but the only thing I heard was, “there’s something big there, could be anything even cancer but you’re young.” As you can imagine, there were a few obvious problems with that statement. Even without medical training I knew you couldn’t speculate like that in front of a patient. The way she threw around the “C-word” so nonchalantly and then dismissed it by mentioning my youth still makes me angry. I was offered no assistance in finding a pulmonologist and felt absolutely alone. So there I was, almost 19, thinking I could have cancer. A few months later I found I had coccidioidomycosis, commonly known as ‘Valley Fever” (something my PCP should have thought of since it’s endemic to our area *facepalm*).

Though I was thankful it wasn’t cancer, I could have never imagined the journey my diagnosis would take me on. Starting antifungal therapy was rough. My hair started to fall out, my skin dried out, my nails turned brittle, and just felt ill all the time. The blood didn’t stop though. It seemed there was no escaping that bloody cough: when I laid down to bed, whenever I tried to exercise, whenever I walked a little too fast to class. I had two pulmonologists during those first two years post-diagnosis. One so close to retirement that his approach was almost negligent. The other, too caught up with the fact that I was “young” to treat my infection aggressively. But both taught me that I never wanted to be that doctor: the doctor that doesn’t care.

In 2011 I met Dr. P. He wore a bow tie and had a jaunty walk. He also wore bright, beaded bracelets that his granddaughters had made him. After telling him my story he grabbed my hands, and told me he was going to do everything in his power to make me better. My eyes welled up. He was my first doctor to actually care. Immediately he called his friends: an infectious disease specialist and a cardiothoracic surgeon and personally scheduled appointments for me. He was the helping hand I had needed all along. That December, two days before Christmas, I finally had a chunk of my right lung resected and graduated from the care of Dr. P to my current ID specialist, Dr. N.

It’s been five years since my journey began, and though I'm still on medication it has been such a blessing to learn the struggles of being a patient so intimately. The lessons I learned while being sick in undergrad have carried over into my first years of medical school. It's these lessons that keep me focused on becoming a great doctor through the seemingly endless stream of facts in our pre-clinical years. Being a patient ultimately taught me that the obstacles presented to us in life are a testament to our strength and allow us to develop into a stronger, more focused version of ourselves. What is even more special about these obstacles is that they happen unexpectedly and we must rise to meet them. In order to do my journey justice I have a duty to become the most empathetic doctor I can be. I never want to be the doctor that didn't care, or the one that didn't listen. I want to be the doctor that did her best.