Forum Posts by
Colleen Farrell
- A Body With Bullet Holes and the Right to Arm Ourselves
Posted on October 12, 2015
At the end of an otherwise quiet night, we were paged to the emergency department for a stat trauma. A man with multiple gunshot wounds was wheeled by paramedics into the trauma bay, his blood pressure perilously low. The surgeons searched his body for blood. They cut off his clothes and rolled his body onto… Read more
- When Words Matter: Medical Education and the Care of Transgender Patients
Posted on June 16, 2015
I was only there to learn how to place IV lines. But as my anesthesia attending and I gathered our needles, tourniquet, and gauze, I noticed that our patient, whom I’ll call Jamie, didn’t appear to fit into a narrowly defined version of gender. I wasn’t sure whether to refer to Jamie as she, he,… Read more
- Learning to Talk Like a Doctor
Posted on May 13, 2013
Three years before beginning medical school, I got off a bus in Granada, Spain and met the family I would be living with for four months. My host parents, Carmen and Monolo, introduced themselves and asked how old I was, where I was from, and how many sisters and brothers I had. Within a few… Read more
- Unexpected Lessons from the Anatomy Lab
Posted on December 14, 2012
We put on navy blue scrubs, plastic aprons, goggles, and gloves and walked into the anatomical dissection rooms for the first time.Three other first-year medical students and I gathered around our assigned table on either side of a black body bag. We unzipped the bag and then peeled away the white sheet that covered the… Read more
- If We’re Going to Talk About My Reproductive Future . . .
Posted on May 3, 2012
When I tell people I’m going to medical school, it’s often not long until the conversation starts moving toward when and how I will have children. When I was 14 and first got the idea that I wanted to be a doctor, one of the first teachers I told asked me how I would do… Read more
- Pink Ribbons, Wire Hangers, and the Politics of Women’s Health
Posted on March 1, 2012
“Pink is the new wire hanger.”  In the flurry of tweets that followed in the wake of the debacle between Susan G. Komen for the Cure and Planned Parenthood, this one was my favorite. It combined two powerful symbols in women’s health–the pink ribbon of the breast cancer movement and the wire hangers used by women to… Read more
