Yale Bulletin and Calendar

February 27, 2004|Volume 32, Number 20

Northeast magazine columnist Jenny Blair in her medical school dorm room.

Medical student shares her
tales in award-winning column

Ever since the fourth grade, when she read the book "Harriet the Spy," Jenny Blair has been a "compulsive" writer.

Back then, Blair -- now a fourth-year medical student at Yale -- identified with the fictitious title character, an 11-year-old social "outcast" who spends her days writing down in a notebook her observations of people on whom she spies.

After reading about Harriet's adventures, Blair too began writing down her observations of those around her. She continued recording her musings about people and life through her years as a Yale undergraduate (Class of 1997), but she never had any writings published until her second year in medical school, when a friend encouraged her to send some of her material to The Hartford Courant. Hoping only to get a piece or two published, she was instead offered a position as a freelance biweekly columnist for Northeast, the newspaper's Sunday magazine, writing for the magazine's medical topics column called "First Opinion."

Within the first year of her assignment with Northeast, Blair -- who focuses her columns on her experiences as a medical student at Yale -- was honored with a prestigious first-place 2003 National Headliner Award in the category "Special Column on One Subject" in a magazine. The Yale columnist beat out such noted writers as Fareed Zakaria, who writes about international issues in a column for Newsweek, and Roger Lowenstein, whose columns on "unconventional wisdom" appear in Smart Money.

Writing about her medical school experiences, Blair says, is both cathartic and a means for her to digest what she sees and learns while doing her various rotations in medical specialties such as internal medicine, emergency medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, and surgery, among others.

"I sometimes don't know what I think unless I write it down," says Blair. "My columns usually start with me being kicked in the gut by something that happens, something that got to me for whatever reason. It's like something broke through this little film of complacency, and it's like a hook around my neck. I tend to mull things over, and a lot of what I write was born from a place of anguish."

In a column she wrote last year, for example, she describes how she "first perceived death" in her first year of medical school, when she dissected a cadaver as part of her anatomy laboratory.

Overcome with a sense of the "immensity" of what she was doing, she writes: "We were skinning a man, piece by piece, and leaving his pelt on his body in any convenient spot. We had tossed aside a piece of the human body, had ruined an arm irrevocably, forever. An arm that ended in a hand, a hand that once lived, that held and touched and ate, a hand that belonged to its owner alone in a way more intimate than any other kind of ownership on earth. We had just taken its skin away. What were we doing? It was not quite horror I felt, but enormity. My glasses steamed up and I felt buried sobs growing out fast in strong branching trunks. I think it was then that I fully understood that this man was dead. That our cadaver -- the bane of our Friday afternoons, formalin-soaked and unwieldy and constantly evading our efforts to find the textbook structures -- had been a man."

In another column, written last fall, she describes yet another encounter with death, this time an actual death in the emergency room of a Minneapolis hospital where she was doing a rotation. (See sidebar below.)

In other columns, Blair has described such experiences as her first time drawing blood (practiced on a fellow student); her panic when she was accidentally pricked with a needle while assisting in a surgical procedure; the helplessness of physicians when a patient refuses medical care; the challenges of learning to balance caring for a patient while maintaining a personal detachment; the "miracle" of talking to a patient after seeing, graphically, their "damaged parts" in trauma surgery; and her ambivalence about cosmetic surgery. In every column, Blair protects patients' privacy by concealing their identities.

One of her favorite columns to write, she says, was "Adding A Muffler," in which she describes her interest in bizarre side-of-the-road attractions -- in this case an 18-foot-high fiberglass statue of a man holding a muffler that stands outside a Cheshire, Connecticut, muffler shop. Blair tells of how she "hungers" for "completely ridiculous" cultural attractions or events -- from Monster Truck rallies to website descriptions of such places as the Toilet Seat Museum in San Antonio, Texas -- as a way of coping with the "life-and-death drama" she experiences as a medical student.

"You've got to have levity," says Blair in a recent interview, noting that visiting such "inadvertently bizarre" attractions as New Jersey's "Fairy Tale Forest," full of stuffed -- but real -- animals in nursery rhyme and fairy tale settings, has become a hobby for her.

Blair, whose father is a cardiologist, was uninterested in medicine while growing up. That changed one day, however, when she saw a young boy lying unconscious in a pool of blood on a street in Jersey City. While police officers were standing around the boy, no one on hand was providing medical care.

"In retrospect, he might have been dead," says Blair. "But at the time, I felt helpless. I had taken an EMT [Emergency Medical Training] course a few years before but I couldn't remember what to do. I was just going nuts, and I thought, 'I can't go through life not knowing what to do [in this kind of situation].' Then I thought, 'I ought to go to medical school.' So I did."

Blair relates her interest in medicine to her "practical" nature, and says that is why she has chosen emergency medicine as her specialty. She has applied for residency programs in emergency medicine at various hospitals around the country.

"When I interviewed for medical school residency positions, I talked to a lot of people, and have noticed that many of the people who choose emergency medicine are alike," comments Blair. "We're all extremely practical, impatient people: We like to see things happen now, and we want to be useful in any situation. We want to know that if there's a convention and someone falls to the ground, we'll know what to do."

While her Northeast magazine columns will come to end with her graduation from the School of Medicine, Blair says her written observations about people and life will not cease.

"I'm dying to write about non-medical things," the medical student says. She hopes to someday write a non-fiction book about something eccentric -- be it a person, a subculture or a place -- in the vein of "The Orchid Thief" by New Yorker writer Susan Orlean, whom Blair calls her "goddess."

Blair, however, has no intention of ever making a living exclusively as a writer.

"I decided early on that I didn't want to be a professional writer because, paradoxically, writing is too important to me, and I didn't want to depend on it as my livelihood. I always wanted it to be the fun thing that I did, feeling that if I got anything published, that would just be a bonus. But wherever I am, I know I'll always make the time for it."

-- By Susan Gonzalez

Recalling a sobering encounter with death

In one of her columns for the Hartford Courant's Northeast magazine, medical student Jenny Blair describes the paralysis she felt during her first real encounter with the death of a patient, a 53-year man with cancer who had been brought to the emergency room after collapsing at a nursing home. An excerpt from that column follows.

"The man had no pulse. His diaphanous electrical rhythm was not the kind you could shock with a defibrillator. When they wheeled an ultrasound up to the bed and put the probe to his solar plexus, his heart was motionless. I wrote that down. The room's buzz began to subside: a certain hesitancy settled over everyone. Finally someone quietly said, 'Let's call it. Fifteen-ten.' Like a cloud of startled flies, everyone backed away from the body. There was a sound of snapping gloves. The dead man lay alone; everything but the breathing tube had been whisked away. I stood there wondering if I had actually witnessed his death.

"Doctors, nurses, paramedics gathered in temporary huddles to discuss ... completely unrelated topics," she continues. "No moment of silence, no blessings, no tears. No one was outright disrespectful, but I hadn't expected the business-as-usual atmosphere. It was time for me to start my shift, but I couldn't just leave. I wasn't used to this at all."

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