As a founding member of Street Med STL, I have learned more about resilience, teamwork, and the power of humanity than from any other life experience. Spending week after week in the community and witnessing our impact on St. Louis has fundamentally changed the way I see myself, medicine, and the role of healthcare in the world. However, as I prepare to apply to residency programs, I find myself struggling to discuss these core experiences.
I know we have done good work and made a real impact, and I am proud of that. I want to share the work that has become a major part of my identity. I also know that my time with Street Med STL is a unique—and potentially attractive—aspect of my application. But there’s the rub: in the face of all the hardship I have seen, I struggle with the idea that this work could somehow be personally beneficial. That I might find advantage in the suffering of others feels antithetical to the mission.
Indeed, it is a central part of medicine as a whole: that this career relies, to some extent, on another human’s hardship, disease, or injury. This might be obvious, but it hasn’t been easy for me to digest. As healers we are in a tangled relationship with suffering and pain. We fight against it, but it also provides us with a livelihood. Even considering physicians’ altruistic impulses, it would be impossible to calculate the ways in which hardship pays our bills.
Homelessness, however, is not an incurable disease or rare condition. It is neither inevitable nor accidental. We know why it happens. We have the resources to fix it, yet we don’t. Instead, our society relies on a network of people like Dr. Nolan and the rest of the Street Med team to bandage over the gaps. It’s not enough.
Maybe this inner conflict is too simple or reductive, too black and white. Maybe it all comes down to a bit of anxiety over starting a career in healthcare and facing some very ugly and harsh truths about how we treat our society’s most vulnerable. I am not entirely sure.
But, I have to submit my residency applications this week and have found it helpful to start thinking about the application as a way to tell my story, rather than as a mechanism to achieve some self-serving next, higher step. Writing about Street Med is a way to honestly tell programs about my values, aspirations, and journey through medical school. I know that by going to residency, I will gain the skills and expertise to help even more people, and it is something beautiful that my hard work can benefit others just as it does me. Moving forward, I know that I will continue to wrestle with the existential conflict that sits at the heart of the career I have only just begun, but in some ways I find this interrogation comforting – a sign that I am not just going through the motions.
