Colleen Farrell
Fourth year student at Harvard Medical School
Posts by Colleen Farrell
- Bioethics Forum Essay
A Body With Bullet Holes and the Right to Arm Ourselves
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayAt 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 ...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
When Words Matter: Medical Education and the Care of Transgender Patients
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayI 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 the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Learning to Talk Like a Doctor
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThree 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 minute...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Unexpected Lessons from the Anatomy Lab
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayWe 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 whi...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
If We’re Going to Talk About My Reproductive Future . . .
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayWhen 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 that and also raise chi...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Pink Ribbons, Wire Hangers, and the Politics of Women’s Health
Read the PostBioethics Forum Essay“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...Read the Post
