Dear Future Healthcare Professionals: Find What Breaks Your Heart

Written by Ananya Bhalla

The Baptist Medical Center Emergency Department is a madhouse on Friday morning. You’re greeted at 6:30 a.m. with bone-colored lights, the pale faces of nurses and techs who’re on the backend of their third 12-hour shift, and a dozen people waiting outside department doors. It’s an odd feeling to arrive to your little L-shaped sector before sunrise and know you won’t see the sun before it sets.

My passion for the emergency room began with late-night EMT drills on dimly lit streets off Guadalupe, grew through endless bus rides from UT Austin to San Antonio, and endured even in the unholy morning hours when opening my eyes felt like peering into a circus mirror. I’ve come to cherish the small pockets of warmth in a cold hospital room—the honor of shaking a patient’s hand, laughing with co-workers, or bringing loved ones together again.

But as much as I love what I do, this job never fails to break my heart.

One of my first patients was a wheelchair-bound man with only a threadbare blanket to fend off the Texas winter. I’d spent over an hour with him—taking vitals over ghostly skin, providing day-old sandwiches, and what little warmth I could—before discharging him for another incoming patient. He was only Spanish-speaking, had no home, and no access to social services. I was told to leave him outside.

Outside, where ice coated the streets and breath misted in the air, where his arthritic fingers would ache, and he would once again burn from the inside out.

His only request was that I fill his water bottle before I left. I still remember kneeling beside him in front of a fountain, digging through bags and bags of sweat-stained clothes and fast-food wrappers, unable to find that bottle. I could have done so many things in that moment—bought him something from the vending machine, grabbed a bottle from the breakroom, or just looked harder for his own. But I was worried I’d already spent too long with one patient, knew my preceptor would be looking for me.

So I told him I was sorry.

And then I left him on that frozen curbside without water.

Months later, I still think of him.

The heartbreaks are many. I’ve entered rooms where patients sat in their own blood for nearly thirty minutes. I’ve removed old, clotted IVs in the waiting room from patients who’d been discharged for hours. I’ve performed CPR to bring one patient back to life, only to watch another slip away before I could catch my breath.

I’ve made so many mistakes—left blood in a patient’s room, blown veins when placing an IV, forgotten to place AED pads on a crashing patient—but there’s always been someone to correct me. Nurses and technicians will teach you something once, supervise the second, and then you’re on your own. You learn quickly; shaky hands and second-guessing have no place in a crisis. And before you know it, you’re more capable than you ever thought possible.

To anyone considering a career in medicine, I urge you to spend time taking care of strangers. It’s the single best way to decide if this work is truly for you. A high GPA, student organizations, and research will only prepare you for one part of healthcare. It’s easy to forget that we’re earning to heal individuals, not just to pass exams or impress the admissions committee (or our parents). But it’s only when I saw people at their worst, and their best, that I learned what being a healthcare professional really means.

To those who have yet to experience heartbreak in this profession—whether through your own hands or another’s eyes—I urge you to keep looking. Find what breaks your heart and lean into it; become someone who can ease that heartbreak for others.

And to those who know exactly what I mean—who have seen the kind of things that make you question whether decades of school, imposter syndrome, and a thousand sleepless nights are worth those baggy scrubs—give it one more try.

You’re making more of a difference than you realize.