Melia Patrick Archives | The Short Coat

From post-surgical family drama to a lidocaine injections without warning — where is the line, exactly?

Dave and his M1 co-hosts Lily Schmidt, Melia Patrick, Jonah Albrecht, and Anna Royer, take a field trip to Reddit’s AITA sub— because self-reflection is not usually how people figure out if they’re the problem. Four posts, four verdicts, and get genuinely sidetracked in the best way: there’s a chlamydia anecdote Dave shares, a philosophical debate about whether watching movies at 2.5x speed makes you a bad partner, and a surprisingly earnest conversation about what med students actually owe their families when they become the designated “medical person” in the room.

The fourth story (med school parents take note!): a doctor-mom posts about telling her struggling pre-med daughter she isn’t cut out for medicine — and then the updates keep coming. A spiral. A traumatic freshman year. A complete reversal. The crew picks it apart with the kind of clinical-meets-human instinct they’re in med school to develop: what happens when a parent mistakes performance for potential, and how does one know if something is a moral failing or a cry for help?

Episode credits:

Producer: Zach Grissom/Dave Etler

Co-hosts: Anna Royer, Jonah Albrecht, Melia Patrick, Lillian Schmidt

Production: SCP Media Lab–Anna Roger, Cyrus Barati, Isa Perez-Sandi, Zach Grissom, Sarah Upton, Srishti Mathur, David Lee, and Jacob Thompson

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The summer between first and second year of med school freedom hits differently when you actually know it’s the last time you’ll truly get to do as you like. Four M1s — Lily Schmidt, Melia Patrick, Jonah Albrecht, and Anna Royer— talk through how they landed on their summer plans: research fellowships, a genetics scholars program, global health immersion in Ecuador, Colorado fourteeners, and the lingering question of whether any of it actually matters for residency. Spoiler: it matters, but probably not in the way you think.

What makes this conversation more useful than the typical med school advice content is how honest everyone is about the pressure to do research whether or not it fits. Jonah is off to Ecuador in part to avoid a lab. Lily is in a clinic implementing joint-capture software partly because she can’t do chart review without going sideways. Melia is doing genetics because she actually likes the patient population, even if memorizing chromosome deletions makes her want to give up. If it sounds like–despite the talk of freedom–they’re all deciding to do something med school adjacent, you’re right. But they are exercising the option to choose the focus of their attention in this last summer of life at the margins of medicine.

Episode credits:

Producer: Anna Royer
Co-hosts: Melia Patrick, Lillian Schmidt, Jonah Albrecht
Production: SCP Media Lab–Anna Roger, Cyrus Barati, Isa Perez-Sandi, Zach Grissom, Sarah Upton, Srishti Mathur, David Lee, and Jacob Thompson