Volume 68, Issue 3 | Page 20

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-