A Week at Yale

Last week I was sitting in a classroom at Yale, wearing scrubs, learning how to suture a fake wound next to a girl named Emily from Colorado I'd known for three days. That's not something I expected to be writing about in this column. But it's stuck with me since I got home to Tahlequah, and I think it's worth explaining why.

I spent a week at the National Youth Leadership Forum on Medicine and Healthcare, a program that brings high schoolers from across the country to Yale's campus to get a real look at what it takes to become a doctor. In one week we covered phlebotomy, triage, physical therapy, suturing, emergency medicine, and neurology, which sounds like a lot because it was. We talked to actual physicians about the parts of medicine nobody puts in the brochure, the exhaustion, the ethical gray areas, the paperwork nobody warns you about.

The day that stuck with me most wasn't even at Yale. We took a trip to New York Medical College, where they ran us through an ER medicine session using their simulators. They brought in actors trained to play patients, and we had to walk in, examine them, ask the right questions, and actually land on a diagnosis, working off a script that laid out the case but left the rest up to us. It was the closest I've come to feeling like a doctor, and also the closest I've come to realizing how much I still don't know.

But if you'd asked me what I'd remember most, I wouldn't have guessed it would be the people. Not the campus, not the labs, not even the moment I got to draw blood for the first time. It was the other kids. Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years old, all of them weirdly serious about wanting to help people for a living, all of them far from home for the first time in a lot of cases.

We stayed up too late talking about things that had nothing to do with medicine in our dorm living room area. We compared hometowns. We argued about nothing. We listened to music and stayed out after room check. By the end of the week I had a group of friends scattered across a dozen states who I hope I don't lose touch with.

I wouldn't have gotten any of it without help. The trip wasn't cheap, and my family isn't the kind that can just write a check for a program like this. So a lot of people here in this community stepped up. Some of you gave five dollars. Some gave more. It added up to something that changed a week of my life, and honestly, probably more than a week. I don't say that to be dramatic. I say it because I think it's easy to assume a small donation doesn't do much. I'm proof it does. I'm home now, back in my own bed, back to normal work and normal Tahlequah heat, but I'm not the same as I was before I left. I know a little more about what I might want to do with my life. I know a little more about what it feels like when strangers decide you're worth investing in before you've done anything to earn it.

So thank you. Genuinely, to everyone and to this community. However much you gave, it mattered more than you probably think it did.

Disclaimer: This column was first published in The Tahlequah Daily Press in the Sunday, July 31st edition. “Opinions expressed by columnists do not reflect those of TPD it's staff, or it's parent company.