Examination Room
I'm writing the first entry of 2012 in a cold, bare examination room at the health clinic for my Primary Care rotation. It's an odd place to be writing, and I feel strange doing so in an environment so impersonal and different than anything I've ever identified myself with. And yet here I am, with a stained short white coat on, with some time in between patients, writing about how I'd rather be elsewhere. More than halfway into my clinical year as a physician assistant student, I have yet to overcome the nagging feeling that I don't belong in medicine. When people ask me what I study, or what I do and I say "PA", I almost feel like an impostor, as if I still don't really belong to the field of medicine and feel guilty for leading others to assume so. Many of my patients here at Covenant House are young and trying to figure out what they want to do in life (while the rest are fixed on becoming famous rappers or actors), and they often ask me if I...