Starburst

by Victoria Moffitt

I found a Starburst in my pocket. It was tucked inside a Patagonia sweater – unofficial uniform of medical students trying to dress the part – that I had worn on my last Emergency Medicine shift. It had been a night shift, the third one of my entire medical career, and I strolled out of the hospital with a sense of pride. I smiled at the sunrise gleaming against Philly’s glass-glazed skyline as I zippered the sweater up against the brisk air. Once home, I slung it across a hanger, sparing it only the brief thought that I should wash it that afternoon. My plan was to sleep for a few hours, study a few more, and head back to the ED the next morning.

The next day, my plans changed. I did not report to triage at the emergency department and I did not place my first IV, a task I had been nervously anticipating for that shift. Instead, the school administration reported that our time at the hospital was suspended. Two weeks, they said, but we could read the subtext. It would be longer.

In the ensuing social distancing, my Patagonia hadn’t seen the light of day. The sweater was sequestered in the corner of my closet, banished there for three weeks because I deemed it contaminated—poisoned by ED air. I finally approached it after nearly a month of clothes-quarantine. I dug my reflex hammer from its pocket, and as I reached into its depths to rescue my trusty penlight, I retrieved a Starburst instead. Fruit Punch flavor.

It was suddenly as if I had opened a time capsule, my weeks in the ED feeling like a lifetime ago. During that last shift (which I hadn’t known would be my last), my resident physician had saved this treat for me. At some point while I was away seeing a patient, someone had distributed the candies to the nurses and doctors at the touchdown station, and my resident had thought to set one aside for me. It was a simple gesture, but such a kind one, coming from my supervisor and teacher, that I recall tucking it my pocket with a sense of warmth.

I had forgotten about the Starburst since then, but my resident and her colleagues in the ED had been in my thoughts. I remembered the way her expression would tighten slightly with concern each time coronavirus was mentioned back in those early days. But I remembered more clearly the way she always guided me with patience and consideration as I stumbled through my ED shifts, brimming with the naivete of a medical student in the first months of clinical training. I can’t imagine the transformation that has occurred in the emergency department since I was last there, nor what my resident is now facing. So I set the Starburst on my desk: a physical emblem of thanks to a resident on the frontlines, to a doctor who took a med student dressing the part and made her feel like she belonged.