From June through late July this year, I had the privilege of being a Gilstrap intern through UTHealth in Houston Texas. This internship gave me the opportunity for extensive shadowing in various fields related to women’s health as well as different settings including private clinics and different hospitals.
The experience helped me to develop a better understanding of what life is like day to day working in medicine both through first-hand experience as well as conversations with doctors, ranging from first year residents to attending physicians with decades of experience. Additionally, the program had the interns following schedules very similar to those of the University of Texas medical students allowing us to witness in great detail what the first few years would be like after college, should we pursue a career in medicine.
However, despite the countless benefits that the program had for the understanding of the life of a physician, I believe that the most influential aspect of the internship were the encounters it provided with patients. Often times the patients would be dealing with a barrier to healthcare that made it much harder to treat their conditions. This ranged from speaking rare dialects that made it hard to consent them for treatment due to a lack of translation resources to patients in incredible poverty who had difficulties getting transportation to the hospital. These patient visits often invoked great sympathy while also showing, from a professional standpoint, how to help the patients. The patient visits exposed me and my fellow interns to the gut-wrenching and life changing news that physicians often have to tell their patients, news such as a cancer that came back more aggressive, or a miscarriage for an expecting mother. Regardless of what the patient had come in for, or what news was delivered to them, each visit helped to further our understanding of not only the medical field and the toll it can have on the workers, but also helped us to better appreciate the blessings we have in our own lives and sympathize more for others that have struggles impacting the very essence of life.
A short blog cannot begin to explain the eye-opening experience that this internship provided and I would like to thank Wabash College, the Wabash College GHI, Dr. Sean Blackwell ’89 and Dr. Ashimi Sunbola for their indispensable help in making this program happen as well as all the physicians at UTH and Memorial Herman Hospitals who welcomed us into their practices.
