The Point of Medicine

One week into a rotation in the Surgical Intensive Care Unit (SICU), I found myself dreaming about the hospital. I was not dreaming about saying the wrong thing on rounds, but I was dreaming about our patients: Mr. Brown’s wife when she’d been told he may not survive his third surgery this admission; Mr. Thomas’s mom crying because she felt responsible for how he’d “turned out.” I told an attending I trusted that I was distressed by how much I was carrying patients’ stories with me, and she graciously admitted to me she’d struggled with the same thing early on in training. The solution, she said, is to not get so attached. “That’s how you burn out,” she said.

I remember early on hearing in the news about a virus causing problems in China. It wasn’t long before we heard news of it spreading. As it began to spread, we were busy planning for March, our busiest month of mission trips. We send the most teams in the month of March, which gives mission opportunities for various schools during the annual spring break period. We sent our first two teams out before countries began closing their borders. While these two teams were still out of the country, we began cancelling our remaining trips. First it was for the month, then it became two and on through the summer. Before we knew it, we had cancelled every single remaining mission trip scheduled throughout the remainder of 2020—all as a result of COVID-19.

I still remember the first time I donned a whitecoat (one of those half-length coats for students) with a stethoscope in my pocket and walked into a patient room at the big city hospital in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1985. I was a second-year medical student at Indiana University, and I had just received instruction from my clinical instructor on how to perform a thorough history and physical. I don’t remember my first patient’s name, but she was a young woman with a loud systolic heart murmur even I could hear. I also remember three words that were to guide me through each step of a thorough physical exam: “Look, listen and feel.” A couple of years later, those three words became critical again as I took my first basic life support (BLS) course and became certified both in BLS and Advanced cardiac life support (ACLS), prior to becoming a surgical resident. Again, the phrase, “Look, listen and feel,” was the guiding mantra to get my first BLS certification card.

“I have been richly blessed by God, and I have a burning desire to do what I can to bring His message to anyone who will listen.” —Peter E. Dawson, DDS

: I became involved with CMDA during my second year of medical school. God was working in my life at that time through several events, and in CMDA I found a welcoming, loving, supporting group of friends who loved the Lord and encouraged me in my spiritual growth.

In this article from the Spring 2019 edition of Today’s Christian Doctor, we feature Shelby Montgomery, a third year at LSU School of Medicine in New Orleans, Louisiana. She received my bachelor’s of science in kinesiology at LSU in Baton Rouge, spending her junior year of undergrad at the University of Hawaii at Manoa on the island of Oahu through National Student Exchange. After graduating from LSU, I worked for one year at Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge as a research coordinator for the Heads Up project.