FEATURE
A SHIFT IN PERSPECTIVE: MEDICAL STUDENT
EXPERIENCES IN THE TIME OF COVID-19
AUTHOR Elizabeth Romes
2020 began as a year of fresh starts -
a new decade promised boundless
opportunities and endless avenues
to explore. Optimism rang from
social media platforms, deeming
this as the year to forget your past,
take control of your life and foster
change. Then, a virus changed it all.
As the first conversations of coronavirus spread to the US, suspicion
remained low and life continued as normal. My first moment of
fear came, as did many others, from a Netflix documentary entitled
Pandemic that discussed the previous influenza pandemic of
1918. As if overnight, words such as ‘social distancing,’ ‘flattening
the curve’ and ‘COVID-19’ emerged, and the optimism that 2020
had adopted disappeared as quickly as the virus fell on our country.
In our third and fourth years as medical students, we are spread
all across the city of Louisville in various clinical settings. Learning
is done through hands-on experience as we translate our textbook
knowledge into clinical practice. Often, we are the front line to
patients; we gather their history, presentation of illness and do a
physical exam before reporting back to our teaching physicians.
Each day presents interesting cases that allow us to connect ailments
to humans and to understand the gravity of our role as physicians.
Through these two short years of medical school, we learn how
to start providing patient-centered care, and we grow immensely
from these very first patients that we treat. Knowledge becomes
applicable and practical, and we want to study for our patients, not
simply for a grade.
Fast forward to March 17, and I can remember exactly where I
sat, in the middle of my psychiatry rotation, while our administrators
18 LOUISVILLE MEDICINE
explained that we were no longer allowed at our clinical sites. We
were expected to leave immediately with no return date in sight.
Suddenly, the hands-on learning that had been promised since the
beginning of our time as medical students was pulled out from
under us. The medical education process that we were always told
to trust in was halted with one announcement. For the first time in
our training, external factors were going to keep us from the very
place where we were learning and growing.
Helpless would be the word that most of us would use to describe
our time in quarantine. As future physicians who had vowed to serve
others in our daily lives, most of us wanted to assist on the front
lines - but we did not have the choice or training to do so. We had to
stay inside, like everyone else, and revert to learning from computers
and textbooks. Patients themselves were no longer able to help
us understand the pathology of their diseases and we were forced
behind a screen to try to simulate a similar learning environment.
The hands-on experiences that we had sought, that we had tried
so hard for, were missing in action – boom. Our understanding of
medicine suffered without associating a real person to each problem.
While fear grew and uncertainty took over all of us, anxiety
flooded through our medical school class. Would we be able to finish
our mandatory clinicals? Would we have time to get things together
and take our board exams, to become residents next June? When
would it be safe for medical students to return? As the virus spread,
feelings shifted more from personal fears to global concerns. With
my brother as an ICU nurse in the COVID-19 unit at Norton, would
he be safe and receive adequate personal protective equipment? We
feared for everyone’s safety. COVID-19 held all our lives in its grip.
June 1, 2020 arrived finally, the day that medical students re-