A Dance With Mrs Chan

As a third-year medical student on an internal medical clerkship, I learned the most important lesson about how to care for patients. I saw my attending physician give attention first to the person he was treating, and then to the patient and her clinical picture. They are not the same, and our training in medical school does not always teach us this distinction. Months later I found myself with an opportunity to truly help another individual who had been clinically and emotionally overcome by his disease. My attending physician's lesson guided me in a very meaningful way: it allowed me to remind a man that he was more than the disease he was fighting. Many times, it may be something very little that we need to do or say but to our patients, these little things end up being the biggest of them all.