Issa Foundation HealthCare Scholarship

Before medical school, I thought medicine was built primarily on answers. I imagined hospitals as places where knowledge could overpower suffering: where the right diagnosis, the right treatment, the right physician could restore order to a body falling apart. I believed healing lived mainly in precision: in lab values trending correctly, in clean imaging findings, in swift clinical decisions made under fluorescent lights. I admired certainty because I thought certainty was what made people feel safe. Then I met a patient who changed the way I understood care. During an early clinical experience, I visited a woman hospitalized with advanced cancer. Her chart was dense with imaging findings, medication lists, and consultant notes that seemed to stretch endlessly through the electronic medical record. Before entering her room, I spent an extensive amount of time trying to memorize every detail of her disease progression because I wanted to prove—to myself as much as anyone else—that I belonged in medicine. But when I sat beside her, she did not ask about her scans. She asked me if I liked music. At first, the question caught me off guard. Then she told me about the symphony performances she used to attend with her husband before he passed away. As she spoke, her fingers moved softly against the hospital blanket, almost as if she were tracing notes only she could hear. After a pause, she apologized for “talking about unimportant things.” I remember feeling unsettled by that apology. Because in that moment, I realized I had unconsciously begun separating medicine from humanity. Somewhere in the process of learning mechanisms and treatments, I had started to think of emotions as secondary to clinical care, as though suffering could only be measured through pain scores, imaging results, or laboratory abnormalities. Yet the deepest pain in that room was not visible on a chart. It was loneliness. Grief. The quiet erosion of identity that illness can bring. I stayed longer than I was supposed to. We talked about music, memory, and how frightening it feels to become invisible inside a hospital room. Before I left, she looked at me and said softly, “Thank you for seeing me like a person.” That sentence stayed with me long after I walked out of the hospital. It changed the way I move through medicine now. I still love the intellectual rigor of medicine and research. I value precision deeply. But I no longer believe competence alone makes someone a healer. That experience is part of why I continue performing music in healthcare settings today through Baylor Art and Music in Patient Care. When I play violin for patients in assisted living facilities or during donor honor ceremonies, I often think about that woman. I think about how easily illness can strip people of familiarity, independence, and connection. Music does not cure disease, but I have watched it restore something equally important: dignity, memory, comfort, and human connection. Medicine is demanding precisely because it asks us to hold both science and humanity at once. The challenge is not simply learning how to treat disease. It is learning how to remain emotionally present within suffering without turning away from it. I think I once believed becoming a physician meant becoming unshakable. Instead, I am learning that the physicians I admire most are the ones willing to stay openhearted in rooms where there are no easy answers.