Latest news with #medicalStudent
Daily Mail
a day ago
- Health
- Daily Mail
To Exist as I am by Grace Spence Green: Don't ignore me - and don't pity me, either
To Exist as I am: A Doctor's Notes on Recovery and Radical Acceptance by Grace Spence Green (Wellcome £16.99, 244pp) On October 17, 2018 Grace Spence Green, 22, a fourth-year medical student, was walking through the atrium of Westfield Shopping Centre in east London towards the tube station when a stranger jumped head first from the top-floor balcony and landed on her neck. The fact that she happened to be walking past at that moment meant Grace broke the man's fall and thus saved his life. But his fall broke her spinal cord. She was paralysed for life, from the chest down. The two would never exchange words. She doesn't even mention the man's name in this powerful and excoriating memoir. On the night of the accident, he happened to be in the bay beside hers in A&E, just for one night. Much later, she discovered he was a migrant who'd been high on weed. He was sentenced to four years in jail for grievous bodily harm, released after serving two, and then deported. She doesn't feel bitterness towards 'The Man', as she calls him, or even any emotional connection. All of her anger, and there's a great deal of it, is directed towards us, the general public, for getting things so wrong in what we say to disabled people, and how we treat them. Prepare to be severely chastened – and re-educated. Grace says she doesn't desire our insatiable curiosity, or our pity, yet she invokes both, strongly, in her visceral account of the aftermath of that fateful day. The week in a high-dependency unit 'in a warm, fuzzy, opioid dream'; the 26 metal staples put down the middle of her back by the surgeon Dr Bull; the eeriness of the 'bloodless injury', which nonetheless wrecked her body; the ominous words spoken by the doctors three months later, at the official prognosis and diagnosis meeting: 'It would be good to see things changing over the next few weeks.' But things did not change. Sensation did not come back to her legs or toes. Up to then, part of her still believed that the operation would 'fix' her, and make everything go back to how it was before. Now, 'my seemingly impenetrable bubble of denial had burst'. It would take eight months for the fact that the injury was permanent, and that she would never walk again, to sink fully into her brain. At the Royal National Orthopaedic Rehabilitation Centre in Stanmore, north-west London, Grace was relieved as well as shocked to meet other young people in a similar plight. There was competitiveness among some of the patients. 'Are you walking yet?' she was asked. 'Not yet,' she'd reply. She recalls the bleakness of returning to the Centre after a few days at home over Christmas with her loving family and her steadfast boyfriend Nathan, to whom she would later become engaged. She thought back to the weekend before the accident: she and her friends had sat up all night round a bonfire in a Kentish field, chatting and laughing. 'Now I find I have lost control of every bodily function, in a place I cannot leave.' She was told she'd need to insert a single-use catheter into herself every four hours for the rest of her life. She felt 'waves of hatred' towards the wheelchair at first – until she learned to appreciate it as a tool, just as spectacles are a tool. She now can't stand the expression 'wheelchair-bound'. She bristles when people use the word 'inspirational' to describe her progress – she calls it 'inspiration porn', as if people get some kick from her 'tragic' story. 'I've heard the word so many times that it's lost all meaning.' But it's hard not to see her as an inspiration. She completed her medical studies, became a junior doctor in 2021 and now makes it her business to protect the dignity and autonomy of her patients, in a way that sometimes did not happen to her. She notices that as soon as she takes off her lanyard and stethoscope at the end of the working day, she becomes 'hyper-visible and utterly ignored'. That's the daily status of too many disabled people. She does not like her wheelchair to be pushed or pulled 'in the name of helping'. It undermines her autonomy. She also hates it when people hold the door open for her: 'It can be much easier for me to do it myself, rather than having to duck under an outstretched arm.' We should say to a disabled person, 'You let me know if you need help.' Questions and remarks that annoyed her while she was in hospital were: 'Is there anything that can be done?'; 'Are you getting better?'; and 'It's not permanent, I hope?' So, don't say those. But also, whatever you do, don't say to a disabled person that you don't see them as disabled. ' 'You're not looking at me properly,' I want to say. 'You are missing a huge part of me by trying to ignore this." ' And on no account must you say you pity her. 'When people do that, it feels as if they have forced their way into my world and spat on it.' Nor must you single a disabled person out for notice, even out of kindness. Once, back at medical school, an instructor was on the phone cross that a lesson was starting late. 'And we have a lady in a WHEELCHAIR waiting in the corridor, so it's just unacceptable.' Grace felt 'shaken, to be singled out in a crowd of peers.' Later, the instructor said, 'Sorry – I'm really sorry, I didn't mean to be offensive, I'm sorry, it was just a stressful situation.' Grace didn't 'interrupt her ramble'. She just looked directly into her eye and said, 'OK'. 'Micro-aggression upon microaggression, piling up,' Grace calls all this. For her, it's an uphill battle to defend her happiness, when the assumption is that she's the 'poor brave tragic girl', whose boyfriend was 'a hero' not to desert her. Every October 17, she celebrates her 'alive day'. The fact that her wheelchair is full of scratches and dents is a sign of a life lived to the full. 'I am going to enjoy a life that society has told me is not worthy. That is activism.'
ABC News
2 days ago
- General
- ABC News
Are teens taught enough life skills to know how to 'adult'?
Mai is a first-year medical student. She also doesn't know how to change a light bulb. After her 18th birthday she moved out of her home in Shepparton, Victoria, to go to university in Armidale, New South Wales. "The whole move out was a bit stressful," she says. "I feel like I was a bit independent, but there was just this big sudden change where now I'm cooking for myself. I'm cleaning for myself. I am transporting myself everywhere. I'm flying on planes alone. "I'm doing this, I'm doing that and they seem like small things, but once you add having to study on top of that, it just all becomes very overwhelming. Mai was thrown in the deep end of the big wide world and quickly realised that while high school had prepared her for university, it hadn't taught her to "adult". "It becomes this thing that we don't talk about and we just expect everyone to know," she says. "Like, OK, I'm all good with the educational side of things, but I don't know how to apply for a Medicare card or I don't know how to check if my immunisations are up to date. "Am I stupider than my friends because I don't know how to do this? "That just kind of takes away part of your confidence." Defining what it means to be an adult can be difficult. You turn 18 and in the eyes of the law, hey presto, you're an adult. But are there certain responsibilities or life skills that inherently qualify as "adulting"? For 16-year-old Casey, who is in year 11, there are. "Adulting to me is being able to provide for yourself and being able to provide for other people," she says. "So being able to take on responsibility for your finances, for basic things in life, like knowing how to get a Medicare card, knowing how to buy a house, how to manage a car, all of those things. Archer, who is 18, feels he should be well-equipped with these skills but suspects he is lacking. "I'd like to think I'm mature, but I think adulting means managing finances and bills, something I don't really do," he says. "I don't do any trades. I don't do much hands-on work. I never really liked it. "I'm not going to leave my house anytime soon, like at all. I'm going to be studying at uni for probably five years and that's all going to go to my HECS debt. "So I'm just going to be sitting in my house, you know, studying, working hard, of course, but I don't need to worry about [adulting] … and there's no reason for me to because it's not practical to leave my house." When asked if she thought her peers were similarly lacking in skills, Casey said it was pretty split. "I think it's pretty 50–50. I think there are some people who are dead set on track, know what they're going to do with life and some people who are like, 'Ah, I don't know what I'm doing!' This apprehension towards "adulting" is a global affliction. In Canada, a handful of universities have begun offering Adulting 101 classes, to fill in the blanks when it comes to life skills. In these classes students learn things like budgeting, changing a car tyre, and applying for a home loan. Across the ditch in New Zealand, a pair of high school students has started a petition to make life skills a compulsory subject. In our neck of the woods, just 60 per cent of young Australians say their high school education prepared them for the future, while almost 70 per cent say they've taken some form of online classes in the past year, often to do with learning basic life skills. Those results are from Monash University's 2024 Youth Barometer Survey. Some participants felt high school hadn't equipped them with basic life skills, and it could be hard to learn them on your own. Teenagers Briar and Mai want to address this knowledge gap by starting a social media campaign called How To Adult. "Basically, the idea of it is a very simplified social media campaign, more like a TikTok page or a YouTube channel, where we would upload these 30 to 60-second videos, just teaching people real skills," Mai says. "So, it's just small things and the idea of it was that we wanted to get information on how to do these things from professionals." Briar and Mai are winners of this year's Heywire competition, an annual storytelling contest run by the ABC across regional and remote Australia. Briar, who is 17 and in year 12 in Wooroolin, near Kingaroy in Queensland, says having a resource like this will fix a problem she feels many young Australians face. "We just have absolutely nothing to go off and we're solely relying on our parents and getting chucked in the deep end almost to try and figure stuff out," she says. "You'd be surprised how many people have part-time jobs within school and have no idea how to save, what to spend, applying for anything government [related], so Medicare cards." Mai says getting professionals to teach these skills via short videos will help young Australians grow in confidence and might even help them save a bit of cash. "Mainly kind of budgeting, renting, even as small as how to change a light bulb, you know, or how to change your car tyre," she says. "How do you apply for a working with children check? How do you check if you're up to date on your immunisations? "You don't want to be paying dollars for, let's say, an electrician to just change a light bulb, or you don't want to go to a mechanic to change your tyre." Both Briar and Mai agree that schools should be taking more responsibility for teaching young Australians life skills. "Schools have always stood for, 'We're preparing you for the real world. We're learning this maths so you can do engineering'. "But it's never as simple as how to change your car tyre, you know?" Briar reckons she spends too much time on things that she says are unimportant. "It's more Shakespeare and all that fun stuff," she says. "We just really need to home in on what's important and what's valuable to get young people educated." "I think schools definitely [are] … a very big part of who we are becoming," Mai says. She acknowledges that parents have a role to play, but says their time is scant. A spokesperson for the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority, which is responsible for setting the Australian curriculum, says it includes content to support the development of crucial life skills such as financial literacy, food preparation and mental health and wellbeing, and sets out skills it wants all young people to develop. Archer reckons parents should be the ones to teach their kids to "adult", but recognises not everyone is afforded this opportunity. "I'd like to say it's your parents [who should teach their kids], because that's what they should be doing, and they've had experience firsthand doing all the adulting stuff," Archer says. "But not everyone's parents are a reliable source … so, I think if we want to be equal, [it should be taught in] schools."
