Empathy in Medical Training: Lessons from Illness

By Maria Jimena Barroso Alverde

When I was little, I honestly believed I had a sixth sense. I’d get this knot in my stomach, or a rush in my chest, and I was convinced something big was about to happen. I didn’t know the word for it back then, anxiety, but it has shaped the way I experience the world. It has made me sensitive, alert, and made me always pay attention to the things few people seem to notice. 

I didn’t know then, but those sensations were my very first lessons in empathy. 

Years later, during medical school, life gave me the lesson I never asked for but somehow needed. At 22, I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. One moment I was learning to use an ultrasound; the next, I was staring at an image that changed my entire life. 

Suddenly, I wasn’t the student standing confidently beside the bed, I was the one lying in it. 

I remember everything: the silence, the heaviness in the room, the way everyone searched for the “right” words, while I sat there trying to process that a part of my body had betrayed me. 

Before that diagnosis, I remember the frustration of not being believed. The months of being told I was “just anxious,” “just tired,” “just stressed because you study medicine.” They reduced my symptoms to personality traits. They dismissed what I felt. Nothing teaches you empathy faster than being dismissed. 

Cancer didn’t only take my thyroid. It also stripped away the emotional distance most students unknowingly carry. I learned what it feels like to hand your fear to a doctor and hope they don’t drop it. I learned how terrifying it is to hear medical terms directed at you. I learned how even well-intentioned reassurance can feel empty when it isn’t accompanied by genuine presence. 

The hardest part was something I didn’t expect; I spent more time trying to protect the feelings of others than my own. I downplayed my diagnosis. I smiled when I wanted to cry. I said “I’m fine” so people around me wouldn’t fall apart. 

That experience taught me my most important lesson– empathy isn’t about being strong for others. It’s about being honest, with yourself and with them. 

After years, when the world finally became quiet enough for me to hear myself, I realized how long I had lived without true peace. Not because I was physically sick, but because anxiety had been my shadow long before cancer arrived. I spent years shaking at night, feeling things I couldn’t name, drowning in my own thoughts. Living without peace teaches you empathy in a completely different way. 

When you’ve spent years in internal chaos, you recognize it instantly in someone else, in the way they breathe, the way they avoid eye contact, the way their voice shakes even when their words don’t.

That’s why I listen differently now. That’s why I believe patients when they say, “I just feel something is wrong,” and that’s why I refuse to rush moments that need softness. 

My illness didn’t make me weaker. It made me aware. It made me human. 

It turned the little girl with the “sixth sense” into someone who finally understands what that feeling really was: a deep, instinctive empathy for anyone who has ever been scared, unheard, or hurting silently. 

Those are the lessons I carry with me every time I walk into a patient’s room, and the ones I’ll continue to take with me into my future career as an OBGYN doctor. 

I am Maria Jimena Barroso Alverde, a final-year medical student and aspiring OBGYN with a

strong interest in global health and improving healthcare access for underserved communities. I

have trained across Mexico, Houston, and Boston, with research and clinical experience at

institutions that have strengthened my commitment to health equity and patient-centered care. I

hope to build a career that blends clinical practice with meaningful global health work. Outside

of medicine, I enjoy dancing, a hobby I’ve had since childhood, and I value spending quality

time with my family and friends, who keep me grounded and motivated.

Instagram: jimenabarrosoal_