Hello Goodbye

A week ago I finished my first year of medical school. The next day I packed my car and drove from Pittsburgh to Boston; on Sunday I will fly to Cape Town for the summer. Those two sentences encompass a lot of improbable journeys—leaving my hometown and 28 years worth of relationships; moving to Pittsburgh, a city whose reputation draws few; and taking a circuitous road to medical school.

As I write this, my closest friend (another ex-Bostonian) sits across from me at Darwin’s café in Cambridge. We’ve snuck in saag from Punjabi Dhaba, one of our go-to foods from our time living on this side of the river. In a few minutes I’ll walk to the yard to meet the man whose encouragement has so shaped this journey. The week here has been unusually sweet, reconnecting with friends and family and the town that I thought I would never leave. Coming back here is a reminder of how much Boston has shaped me and how fortunate I am for the relationships I forged here.

I decided to start this blog to keep in touch with people while abroad this summer. A little bit about why I’m going: we are “encouraged” to spend our first summer doing research. While some of us joke that the school would like us to pipet peptides into kidneys, I have been fully supported in my desire to pursue a different sort of project. Broadly, Cape Town presents an opportunity to look at the intersection of social justice and medicine; more specifically, I’m looking at access to palliative care in urban and rural populations there. It’s a great privilege to work on this project.

Happy reading!