As she heads to Match Day, this medical student takes nothing for granted

BUFFALO, N.Y. – As they go through their training, medical students can’t help but be impacted by the health care experiences they and their loved ones have had. And while they may come to view those situations in a more nuanced way as they advance in their studies, some of them will inevitably influence how they practice medicine. 

For Sydney Johnson, a fourth-year medical student in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University at Buffalo, this is absolutely the case as she counts down the days until Match Day on March 20. At the start of her second year in fall 2022, the otherwise healthy 24-year-old was stricken with a severe stroke, likely related to a COVID-19 infection and other simultaneous risk factors.

‘A perfect storm’

Elad Levy, MD, L. Nelson Hopkins Chair of Neurosurgery at the Jacobs School who led the neurosurgical team, called it “a perfect storm.” She was diagnosed with several cerebral venous sinus thromboses (CVST), a rare condition where blood clots form in the brain’s venous sinuses, preventing blood from draining out of the brain and necessitating a complicated surgery.

Thanks to Levy — an international expert in neurovascular disease — and his team, the surgery was a success. Johnson surprised them with the speed of her recovery, but she faced a long and challenging road ahead. The fatigue was overwhelming and, at first, she had to use a walker. Unable to drive, she was dependent on her mother to both organize a demanding schedule of appointments and take her to them. There were sessions with physical and occupational therapy, as well as appointments with neurosurgery, neurology, cardiology and hematology. She found out she would have to postpone her second year of medical school.

Johnson was absolutely committed to her rehabilitation regimen. At the same time, she continued to help lead the Student National Medical Association, White Coats for Black Lives, and worked with community anti-violence groups based at Erie County Medical Center to develop an elective in trauma-informed care, work that grew out of a project she had begun as a summer fellow funded by the Department of Surgery. It has now been incorporated into the Jacobs School curriculum.

She also worked with Liise Kayler, MD, chief of the Division of Transplant Surgery in the Department of Surgery, on the feasibility of using animated videos aimed at improving knowledge about kidney transplants among end-stage kidney disease patients with the goal of getting more of them transplanted.

Committing to OB-GYN

Interested in OB-GYN since before medical school, Johnson says it took no time for her to realize that was the right decision once she started her OG-GYN rotation.

“I was like 30 minutes into my first shift and then I was helping to deliver a baby!” she says. “Afterward, I was like ‘wait a minute, what did I just witness?’ And I was thinking if that’s what this feels like, it can’t lose its excitement.”

She began investigating ‘away rotations,’ where students get additional experience in their chosen field doing a rotation at another institution. She spent a month in OB-GYN at Georgetown University, which she said was “amazing.”

Then it was fourth year and time to apply to residency programs. Johnson says it’s generally suggested that people apply to between 30 and 60 residency programs. “You want enough interviews to statistically match,” she says.

‘It came up a lot’

As Johnson went on interviews, her stroke and the lessons she learned from it were often discussed. “It came up a lot,” she says, “I couldn’t ignore it.” As she talked about the experience, she realized how much it had impacted how she sees medicine and how she wants to provide care.

“It really solidified for me the kind of physician I want to be,” she says. “It made me understand the context that people come to the hospital in. Nobody is coming in because they want to, but they do want to be taken care of and be healthy when they leave. There are lots of barriers to having that happen, but whenever you can, if you take an extra minute to talk to people, it can change the course of their treatment.”

Through her rotations, she always has in mind how each decision the care team makes can profoundly affect outcomes and how important it is to consider the life of the patient once they leave the hospital.

“It makes you look at life differently,” she says of her stroke. “I try not to dwell on negative things too long. I think it really just preserved my humanity. I want to treat people the same way I was treated.”

Just a few weeks ago, Johnson was pleased to learn she was being dismissed from her regular neurosurgery appointments. “Since I was so young, they wanted to take images pretty frequently to see if my blood vessels would stay open and to see if they’d need to place stents or coils,” she explains. “But I’ve been stable. They told me, ‘You’ve graduated!’”

With Match Day just a few days away, and medical school graduation coming up in May, that dismissal was a welcome surprise in a semester that has had quite a few. Earlier this year, Johnson was inducted into both the Gold Humanism Honor Society and the national medical honor society, Alpha Omega Alpha.

“I will be happy to be employed at the end of this long, long journey and I’m happy to have made it to the end,” she says. “It was not promised for quite some time. When I talk to people about how I’m really happy to be here, I tell them, ‘You don’t understand; I could have maybe not had full use of my tongue or my hand or my eye or maybe not have been able to walk about independently.’

“I am just grateful to be here.”