During the two-week elective he teaches at WMed – Narrative Medicine and the Physician Storyteller – Tyler Gibb, JD, PhD, challenges students to take time to write and reflect, to tell a story in the creative medium of their choosing.
Some students choose to take on poetry or prose, while others have done non-fiction family history projects, painting, or digital art. One student even wrote an original piece of music.
But Abigail Cheng, who graduated from WMed in May with the MD Class of 2021, took a very different – and unique – approach with her storytelling.
Cheng, a Vancouver native who is heading to the University of Nevada Las Vegas this summer to begin residency training in General Surgery, completed the elective earlier this year prior to Match Week and told her story with a four-course meal she titled “Medicorum Odyssea” with each course representing a year spent in medical school.
“This was a really great opportunity to kind of slow down and just reflect,” Cheng said recently.
The meal Cheng put together, which she served to Dr. Gibb and his wife on her front porch, began with a salad consisting of green papaya, spicy Thai shrimp dressing, and dry roasted peanuts. That was followed by a soup made of fennel and leek and oyster and shiitake mushrooms. Next was a Taiwanese braised pork with blanched bok choy, a soft boiled egg and brown and glutinous black rice. The meal concluded with a dessert made with mango mousse, passionfruit curd, and biscoff crust.
“It was fabulous,” Dr. Gibb said of the meal.
Cheng wrote a detailed biography about the meal, describing how each course represented a year of her journey at WMed. Here’s what she said:
- “In the first year, medical students are naïve, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed. We are beyond excited to finally started our medical journey. We think ‘we’ve made it’ as we recite the Hippocratic Oath, unaware of the firehose of information and struggles to come. This is symbolized by the green papaya salad: raw ingredients, mainly light colors (tabula rasa) with some spots of color and spicy dressing, signifying the burning fire in us.”
- “Second year is deemed the “depressing year.” We’ve been sitting in lecture halls for too long and Step 1 looms close. Many of us are slowly losing our sanity, wondering when we will ever touch a real patient. This is represented by the green and thickness of the leek and fennel soup. However, the mushrooms give the depressing soup some sustenance, representing the accumulation of knowledge that will prepare us for our clinical years, despite our contempt towards our current position.”
- “Third year. We’re out of the dark ages! This is when I re-found my love for medicine. Being able to apply the knowledge from the first two years to clerkships brought meaning to those two grueling years. The assortment of foods in this dish (braised pork, bok choy, egg and rice), as well as the dish’s heartiness, signify the variety of clerkships we rotated through. Third year was my epiphany year – when I realized that I wanted to be a surgeon (represented by the soft-boiled egg – golden treasure). But I will never forget my experience from every clerkship, all with distinct flavors and textures.”
- “Now in fourth year, it’s time to spread our wings. The dessert to match comes in a chocolate dome, representing the anticipation of match week. As the dome opens up, we find out if we matched. And as we open our golden envelopes, the tanginess of the passionfruit curd is hopefully a pleasant and forever memorable surprise.”
As she spoke about her project recently, Cheng said she enjoyed the exercise because it allowed her to tell a story about a very important part of her life using her love of cooking.
She said she came up with the idea of using a four-course meal to tell her story from watching short videos on Facebook in a group called “Eater.” Cheng said the Facebook group has a section called “Everything in Place” that highlights different Michelin star restaurants and shows how they create certain meals, the stories behind those meals, and how each ingredient tells a story and has a purpose.
Cheng said she enjoyed the Narrative Medicine and the Physician Storyteller elective even more than she expected to and she appreciated the opportunity the course offered to slow down and reflect on her four years at WMed.
“We just don’t have time otherwise to sit down and collect our thoughts,” Cheng said. “We’re so busy, so it’s hard to sit and be in your thoughts. This elective allows that, and I think that’s important for our professional and personal development.”