Personal Narrative: My Perception Of The Emergency Room

“Why are you doing this to yourself? Just quit already.” These thoughts perverted my mind as my feet landed one after the other on the treadmill. One mile down, four more to go. I would never have imagined myself running on that treadmill my freshman year at Iowa. I had a BMI of 37 going into my freshman year of college and my physician warned me numerous times to change my lifestyle. I dismissed their warnings with youthful ignorance. However, there I was laboring away on that treadmill, with only one response to those thoughts begging me to quit, “This pain is nothing compared to how you felt that day.”

My dad was never out of shape, but he also wasn’t as healthy as his physician asked him to be. That fact did nothing to stop the heart attack he suffered months before my freshman year at Iowa. There laid my dad, unconscious with tubes protruding

My perception of the emergency room was shaped by what most envision when they think of the emergency room; chaos, constant action, and more impersonal than other types of medicine. In reality it was more personal than I ever could have imagined. While volunteering, I walked in on a man lying in his bed with a surgical mask on. The man asked me to sit. He told me about his spinal tumors and how he had spent the last 22 years of his life in and out of the University of Iowa Hospital and Clinics. As he was telling me this, he never once seemed bitter or dejected. Instead, he was welcoming, expressive and positive about our conversation. To see how medicine was from the physician’s stand point, I shadowed my personal physician. I was able to see the side of medicine, more specifically the aspects of medicine that are held outside of the hospital and in the private practice setting and how the impact that a caring physician had on patients, even in non-life threatening