Waves

Melissa Chiang
she/hers
2021

The COVID-19 pandemic hit 75% of the way through my intern year, my first year of being a doctor, and I felt the reverberations of that trauma throughout the remainder of my training. It has been a long journey to process the experiences I had during those initial months as well as the layered emotions that came with continuing to train and provide healthcare as the pandemic wore on. I drew this comic as part of a Narrative Medicine elective I did during my third and final year of internal medicine residency to help with some of that processing. The comic medium allowed me to share some snapshots in my head that just wouldn't leave me and externalize the various emotions that I so often keep hidden, proving to be quite therapeutic.