Remembering my own medical experiences is an insistent reminder that disease is not mundane, no matter how desensitized we may grow to it.

Tom Fouché, a fourth-year medical student at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine in Chicago, Illinois, reflects on his dual identities of provider and patient and how not keeping them separated makes him a better physician.

The essay read in this episode was published in the Teaching and Learning Moments column in the August 2022 issue of Academic Medicine. Read the essay at academicmedicine.org.