How can I save a life
when mine has experienced so little?
How can I give a patient back their breath
when mine has barely begun to speak the language of medicine
and say the words it needs to be fluent in?
How can I be the voice to trust,
in a room of white coats, hospital gowns, and scrubs,
when my voice stumbles over the basics?
My heart is full of the lives it will meet.
My hands quake with the phantom touch
of the patients I will heal.
My ears ring with the echoes of the tears
of those I will not save.
My face flushes with the thought
that there will be so many
I will not even have the chance to help.
My whole body is dedicated to this path I have chosen
this career, lifestyle, passion
this history and tradition
of innovation, dedication, and legacy
of pain, elitism, mistrust, and discrimination.
So how do I break in to this historic past
Without succumbing to its sickly history?
How do I leave a mark?
How do I cut, exhume, repair a whole sordid history
when I can’t yet save the individual in front of me?
I know that I will learn the trade.
I will learn to speak this new language.
I will learn to cut, evaluate, and prescribe.
But how will I learn to speak to the past?
To cut into this new world
and evaluate how my small career fits within a large legacy?
How can I learn to prescribe a future?
How can I save a life
when that life is busy giving and taking life itself?
How can I give a patient back their breath
when the patient has been gasping for thousands of years
and I am just one small pair of lungs?
How can I be the voice to trust
in a room of white coats, hospital gowns, and scrubs,
without stumbling into the old words
that spoke this life into existence?
I save this life with other voices that will pick up when I stumble.
I save this life with other bodies that are dedicated.
With other full hearts, ringing ears, quaking hands, and flushed faces.
Together we will cut, exhume, repair, examine and prescribe.
Together we will save this life one life at a time.
Until it is healed of its past.
How can I save a life?
I can’t. But we can.
Zoë graduated Williams College in 2017 where she studied Art History. She is passionate about women’s health, social justice, and the inherently human sides of medicine. Zoë is currently an MS2 at the Perelman School of Medicine.
