‘This Will Make You a Better Doctor’

May 27, 2025 by Danielle Penney

There is nothing in a textbook that prepares you for the moment you’re staring at a graph of your hemoglobin dropping. No amount of clinical experience can equip you to lie for days in a hospital bed with four tubes coming out of your body – a PICC line in one arm, a drainage tube in your abdomen, an IV in the other arm and a Foley catheter anchoring you to the bed.

As medical trainees, we spend years learning to care for patients – the intricacies of pathophysiology and evidence-based algorithms, the subtle art of breaking bad news. But absolutely nothing prepared me to be a doctor better than being a patient.

In late 2023, I was a final-year medical student. My biggest concern, like most of my peers, should’ve been CaRMS residency applications. Instead, I was hospitalized with a post-operative abdominal abscess – a large infection that formed after an emergency surgery.

One moment, I was rounding on patients on the surgical floor; the next, I was one of them. Despite trying to dismiss my high fever and racing heart as just being a “tired med student,” I was admitted to hospital and soon realized the patient sharing my room was one I had rounded on earlier that morning – there were no other beds available. I wanted to disappear into the floor.

Later, when I had enough strength to walk in that thin, crispy hospital gown, other patients would occasionally call out, “Hey, weren’t you my doctor?”

Looking away, I’d mutter “I’m not a doctor,” which, technically, wasn’t a lie.

Read more at Healthy Debate