Along the journey of illness and healing
By Crystal Mackay, MA'05
Tina Zhou, Medicine Class of 2020, poignantly remembers an interaction she had with a medical student at an appointment with her mother. Shortly after she immigrated to Canada from China, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, and she remembers being touched by the patient-doctor interaction and watching the medical student learn from her mentor.
Until that moment, she hadn’t even considered medicine as a career, but she remembers her mother turning to her and saying, “Maybe one day that could be you – learning as a medical student.”
Zhou spent much of her high school years navigating a new country on her own. Her mother’s cancer diagnosis meant that she travelled back and forth to China where she had family supports, while Tina stayed in Canada to focus on school.
“It was like we were fighting a war and we all had our roles on different battlegrounds. My role was to stay in Canada and finish school while my mom received medical care,” she said.
“It was like we were fighting a war and we all had our roles on different battlegrounds. My role was to stay in Canada and finish school while my mom received medical care,” she said.
Zhou says the moment with the medical student stuck in her subconscious throughout the rest of high school and into her undergraduate years as she studied genome biology and health economics at the University of Toronto. Drawn to health-related fields already, she realized that she really wanted to see health care in action and to understand the clinical applications and real-world outcomes of medicine.
She knows that her mother would have been so proud to see her receive her white coat and begin her training at the Schulich Medicine – Windsor Campus. She passed away in 2013, just three years before Zhou fulfilled her mother’s premonition and became a medical student.
Now, with three years of medical training and clerkship under her belt, Zhou hopes to continue her residency in internal medicine. Her experiences in the Medicine Clinical Teaching Unit at the Windsor Campus solidified her love of internal medicine.
“It transformed the way I view medicine,” she said. “Being able to take care of sick patients and follow them for many weeks allowed me to be on this journey with them through their illness and healing.” She says being in a smaller centre like Windsor also provided the opportunity to see people as inpatients and then as outpatients on a different service.
“It made me realize that I wanted to do something that allowed me to have that continual longitudinal patient care, but also in an acute hospital setting. Internal medicine offers me both.”
In her spare time, Zhou loves to rock climb and fulfills her passion for photography as the Class Historian, a term she loves because of the way it evokes the true meaning of taking a photograph as documenting the life of her class.
“It really is such a unique group of students, staff and teaching faculty here in Windsor,” she said. “The students all bring different strengths to the class and it has made this experience, which can be challenging, so much more enjoyable and memorable. Because our groups are so small, we really integrate tightly and learn from each other. I want to shout out to my classmates for being amazing supports and mentors to each other.”
