Our Global Health Shuk....by blogger Jonah Kreniske

It is almost cliché to note how easy it can in medical school be to become so focused on detail that you lose sight of the broader picture. As day follows day of lecture, and night follows night of clicking through Powerpoint slides and memorizing biochemical pathways, it is no challenge to forget why you learn what you learn. In fact, it is sometimes said you can get everything you need to know in the first two years of medical school from Wikipedia. As far as the USMLE is concerned, that may be true. Wherever you are in the world, whatever the quality of your education, there is a compendium of basic facts in a clearly delineated range of subjects that you must know by the end of your second year. These are the things you need to know in order to be granted your MD. I wonder though, is this all that we ought to know?

            For the past week, British trained Trauma surgeon Dr. Seema Biswas has guided my class through very full days of lectures and discussion on global health. Regaling us with tales from her time training the surgeons of Somaliland and her Red Cross relief missions, as well as from her current work at Ziv Hospital in Tzfat, Along with Dr. Biswas, we had the privilege of hearing from Dr. Wajdi Safadi, another Ziv trauma surgeon who has founded a clinic in his Golan Heights town of Majdal Shams.          

Dr. Safadi explained to us how he works 7 days a week, split between his clinic and his hospital position, in order to bring healthcare to his community, where there had been none. Dr. Biswas described working in South Africa, and her recent training in Germany for an upcoming mission with the Red Cross. The orientation culminated with a ‘Global Health Shuk,’ where we were invited to get started on our own work, by engaging with local leaders in community health and humanitarian projects.

The orientation is over now and we are on vacation. But our education continues. The slow rocking of an early morning train is carrying four of us up the coast, bleary eyed, as the sun rises overhead. Five days after beginning our course on global health, we have caught the 3am train to Akko, heading to Dr. Safadi’s clinic on Israel’s northern border. People sometimes ask why we would come all the way to Be’er Sheva, for medical school. The answer is because we are chasing after what we ought to know.  - Jonah Kreniske, blogger of the month

What matters most, by Jonah Kreniske

A gentle breeze wafts in from the balcony, sliding through my open door and bringing a welcome chill. I step out and rest my hands on the iron banister. In the distance I can make out the hills of Ramot, barely lit by a low, rust colored moon.  My neighborhood, Gimmel, winds out below me. Undulating Hebrew and Arabic beats from nearby apartment complexes mix with the usual classic rock standards from Coca bar up the street.  If it were daytime, you would hear the Ethiopian children across the street playing in the yard of the New Immigrant Absorption Center. But it is almost one in the morning, and they are sleeping now. I should probably be sleeping too. Instead, I’m standing here, breathing in the city. From my balcony I can see Soroka Hospital. A shining invitation to the unwell of the desert night, it is a slice of sleek modernity in the dusty streets.

The past month, in that hospital, has been a whirlwind introduction to our new lives as physicians in training. We have met our classmates and together we have absorbed myriad lectures, and trudged through hours of intensive Ulpan. Now, in this rare moment of relative calm, I look across at the maternity clinic, and I wonder if someone is being born behind those walls. It’s comforting to remember that life begins here. On Monday, walking past the ER to my first class, a weeping woman swept past me. Glancing towards the ER doors she had burst out of, I saw another woman writhing on the floor. An ambulance had just arrived. Never have I heard so much pain in the voice of another human being as I heard in the cries of that woman outside the ER, on my way to 8am class.  At Soroka we see what we might push to the back of our minds in another context. We see illness and death, birth and health, side-by side, tipping weights on a human scale.  

“Good medicine is not about killing microbes, it is about keeping human bodies in balance,” one professor reminded us. On the hospital campus, in the tireless work of the physicians and nurses who pace its halls, and in the aspiring faces of my classmates, I see the will to maintain that balance. In the struggle to provide care, I see the physical manifestation of the compassionate instinct that I would like to believe is somewhere in all of us. As I step back into my room for the night, I know another long day of classes awaits us in the mounting heat of the morning, but I also know that this day will be another small drop on the side of the scale that matters most. - Jonah Kreniske, September blogger of the month