It was the day before Thanksgiving. I had just come home after my third day on psychiatry. I’d recently finished my neurology rotation, still recovering from the three long months of internal medicine before that. I decided to head to the local YMCA — the same one I used to go to back in high school. I’d spent countless hours there playing basketball, ping-pong, and swimming with old friends. I figured I might run into someone I knew.
To my surprise, there were maybe five people in the gym that evening. I got my workout in and was heading out when I heard someone call, “Hossam!”
I turned around, and at first, I didn’t recognize him. His right eyelid was closed, his head misshapen and slightly turned. I kept talking with him, and mid-sentence, it hit me — I knew exactly who he was.
A few years ago, a friend from school had been in a horrific car accident — one that nearly took his life. I remember seeing it all over social media, donating to the GoFundMe, and feeling that sick pit in my stomach for days. And now, here he was, standing in front of me.
I asked how life was going, how his recovery had been. Thankfully, he told me he’d made a full recovery — nearly 100% back to his old self. He could drive, take care of himself, and he was back at the gym regularly. That’s why he was there.
Then he asked what I was up to. I told him I was in medical school, hoping to become a doctor in a year and a half.
What he did next rocked me.
He pulled down the collar of his shirt to reveal a scar on his neck.
“I’m sure you know what this is.”
I immediately recognized it — a tracheostomy scar. I nodded and said, “Yeah. I do.”
Then he pointed to his abdomen. “I’ve got another one here from a feeding tube.”
I was stunned. I didn’t know what to say. I’ve seen patients with trachs and PEG tubes before — but never walking around in the community. Never in front of me. Never as an old friend.
I congratulated him on his recovery and told him how proud and happy I was to see him. It’s not every day you meet someone who was once considered beyond saving — walking, talking, and lifting weights.
He smiled and said, “I’m glad I got to see you at the gym and not at the hospital.”
As I kept walking down the hallway making my way towards the exit, I felt a heaviness in my chest. We learn about procedures, diseases, and treatment plans through question banks and during rounds. But seeing their aftermath in someone I knew — someone everyone thought wouldn’t make it — hit differently. It reminded me that behind all the lab values and CT scans, there’s a real person.
In medicine, we sometimes get so bogged down in the details — the sodium is 128, the ejection fraction is 30%, the INR is too high to proceed. We become fluent in a language of lab values, imaging findings, and protocols. We analyze, optimize, and treat. We round on patients like items on a checklist, each with a problem list we aim to tackle before noon.
But somewhere along the way, we forget there’s a story behind every number. We forget that the patient with a tracheostomy isn’t just a procedure note in the chart — he’s someone’s childhood friend, someone who once played basketball at the YMCA on summer nights, someone who somehow survived the unimaginable and made it back to the gym.
As a third-year medical student, you transition from studying to practicing — and that shift is massive. You go from doing Anki and flipping through First Aid to suddenly applying those hundreds of pages to real people, with real lives and real consequences. You write notes that actually get read. You suggest plans that actually get implemented. And the stakes feel higher — because they are.
And in that transition, it’s easy to hyper-focus on performance: Are my presentations tight enough? Did I interpret that EKG correctly? Am I asking the right questions on history? But this encounter reminded me that medicine isn’t just about being right — it’s about being present. It’s about remembering that those “cases” we read about are people with birthdays, gym memberships, and families who prayed they’d make it out of the ICU alive.
That night, I realized how easy it is to compartmentalize — to separate the clinical from the human. But seeing my friend with that scar, hearing him say “I’m glad I got to see you at the gym and not at the hospital,” collapsed that boundary for me.
It brought me back to why I started this path in the first place. Not just to memorize the treatments or pass the boards — but to walk with people through the darkest moments of their lives and hopefully help them come out the other side. To be part of their story, not just their management.
That encounter didn’t teach me something new from a medical standpoint. But it taught me something I didn’t even know I needed to remember — that healing is more than numbers and notes. Sometimes it’s just recognizing the person in front of you.
And sometimes, if you’re lucky, you get to see them not as a patient, but as a survivor — alive, standing tall, and lifting weights at the same gym you grew up in.