Author: Reema
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Meeting a Stranger
I stood beneath my attending’s towering frame. My knees were buckling from standing and the crease in my new sneakers were sharpening as I periodically rose on my toes for a clearer window. I was unaware of the plan for this patient, as I’d walked in with his body face down on the operating table.…
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Redemption Arc
As a child, I could effortlessly lose myself in the breadth of my imagination moments before I dozed off to sleep. Glow-in-the-dark stars littered the ceiling of my childhood bedroom, reflecting faint patches of light in a darkness that hugged me to a deep slumber. Each evening, I’d glance up at those stars with a…
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Dear Donor,
“Day by day, what you choose, what you think, and what you do is who you become.” Heraclitus Our lives are saturated with the jurisdiction of choices. So much so, that when you make the choice to come to medical school, you quickly learn that you will have worldly friends who dabble in Greek Philosophy…
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Knowing everything at 18, but nothing at 22
Graduating college almost three months ago was just like any ordinary day. I’d woken up to the sound of the 8:30 am garbage truck making a hodgepodge of thuds and hisses, as it temporarily obstructed the morning light that soaked into my second floor apartment. A door unlocked, and the click echoed off the thin…
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A Living Paradox
A glance in the mirror is all it takes to tell the story of a wistful generational dream. A dream clung on by the innate human desire for better, for more. But a dream so paradoxical in nature that it spins like a top in hypnotizing circles through an endless labyrinth. It was in the…
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The Intrusive Thought
A semester into being a senior in college has warranted a lot of unprecedented behaviors. One of them was being a little too reminiscent of the freshmen’s boundless enthusiasm as if that hadn’t been me a few years ago, while also calling my little brother every weekend to live vicariously through his adventures. Nonetheless, it…
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The Torrential Downpour of Regret
How to be a Game Changer in Accepting Regrets and Moving On My family and I have always gone back to southern India every few years to visit our extended family in the summer months. The first months of the summer bear an intense heat that leaves a slick cast over our foreheads. That is…
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In with Old, Out with the New
A Game Changer in Revitalizing our Old Selves For my 21st birthday this year, my friends pitched in to buy me a born-again film camera- it captures pictures digitally but appears with the aesthetic of developed film. My dad, the photography buff he is, didn’t quite understand the sudden interest in a camera that seemed…
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The Sentiment of Tomorrow
A Game Changer in Growing Up I came across a video that appeared on my Snapchat memories from around a year ago. It was a video I suggested we make for my friends and my future selves, as we hiked to our dorm across campus. We asked all the enthralling questions we had at the…
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A Second Identity Crisis
A Game Changer in Accepting my Identity One of my earliest childhood memories is dancing with my parents to the age-old Bollywood classics in my living room. The Kal Ho Na Ho soundtrack made its way to every corner of my childhood home, entangling with spoken words of my mother tongue. Listening to that music…
Personal Reflections 