Reflection On Our Memorial Service

From the first day of orientation, we are taught to think about our donors as our first patients. They are not a tool or a textbook, they are patients. A generous human being and their family left within our care our first patient so that we could intimately learn the workings of the human body. We have learned from several established physicians that medicine, at its core, is about the fundamental appreciation of the human body. Everything that we take from our first class and first patient will shape and direct our medical decision making throughout our careers. This selfless act from our donors will come to affect our lives, in shaping our education and preparing us for the reality of diagnosing and treating patients, and in shaping the lives of all of our patients to come.

It is a long-held tradition at Quillen and at several medical schools to hold a memorial service for our first patients following the end of our Human Anatomy course. We as a class solemnly joined together in the anatomy lab and as teams we stood by our workstations; now draped in white linen and marked by a single candle and flower and for those who were veterans, the flag. After joining in music, representatives from each team spoke to honor the life and legacy of their first patient by sharing the little information we knew about our first patients. During this service, I was reminded of many things.

Firstly, I imagined the life of my first patient after studying their physical form. The service reminded me that one’s physical features are only part of their story. The truly important parts of their lives were things that we could not learn from their bodies, such as the lives they led, memories they held, or how many other lives they touched. In the future, I hope to remember that when a new patient is in front of me with X-rays, lab values, and physical exam findings that they are more than the sum of their parts, that I am treating a whole person, not a disease.

I was also reminded that we all want to leave behind a certain legacy for which we are well known, but our first patients chose to have their legacy be one of anonymity. We will never know their names or what else they left behind except for the knowledge we gained. Our first patients and their loved ones made a choice to forego the traditional grieving process to further our education so that they may play a role in making the world better for their fellow man. Our future patients will never know that they are benefiting from the anonymous legacy of a kind and generous donor. I will always remember the humility and service shown to us by our first patients.

Finally, I was reminded that there are important times to be detached, but, more importantly, there are times to be vulnerable. The process of learning medical anatomy is a very visceral process and one must detach oneself to a certain extent to learn the material. Anything less and you will have done a disservice to yourself, your first patient, and to the people you hope to treat with this knowledge. But as one of my classmates pointed out, during times like our memorial service, we must remain within the moment. Our class shattered the walls that we built during our time in anatomy, and we allowed ourselves to be vulnerable to our emotions. We remained compassionate, empathetic, and connected during our memorial service. We recognized them as more than the knowledge they gave us, but rather as the person they were and the life they lived. In the future, when cases may be emotionally difficult, I hope to remember that I must stay vulnerable and take the opportunity to empathize with my patients and their family in order to provide them with the best care possible.

To say that I have been moved by this memorial service and my first patient would be an understatement. I found it inspirational to encounter so early in my medical education that death is not necessarily the enemy or the result of poor healthcare. It is not the failure of the physician or the lack of exhausting all options. It is the natural next step in life. “My first patient’s bravery in seeing beyond her own death and seizing the opportunity to help someone else’s life” is a phrase from a classmate that I will forever carry.

In memorial to my first patient:

What brings you in today, our predecessors may have asked.

I'd like to think they laughed with you and you with them, until the very last.

From you we learned among many things;

A respect for life and death, the beauty of creation, how it is we draw our breath.

From you we learned many things, and many things we could not learn;

Like what it was that made you smile or the things you liked to share.

What things did you enjoy? Or What things you could not bear?

Were summer rains as sweet to you, did you love the mountain air?

Was Laughter more your forte? A joke, that you could share?

Or with heart and voice did you sing praise, and curse the devil's snare?

What brings you in today, our predecessors may have asked.