Episode 13: rachel thommen

May 23, 2021

I was a really quiet baby; I always think that's hilarious. I was really easy to travel with, I didn't cry. And I think it's partly because I was bilingual. It took me longer to actually start talking initially because they say that kids that hear multiple languages in the home, it kind of takes them longer to organize what the hell is going on. But my mom always joked that after I started talking, I haven’t shut up ever since.

I actually started speaking Spanish before speaking English. That’s like a “cool” thing to do for your kids now but it was kind of different back then. My parents thought, ‘great, our kid’s bilingual, we want to nurture that!’. But sometimes other family members would be like “why does she say jugo, why can't she just say juice?”

My nanny, Maria, taught me to speak Spanish. I always say the gift of being able to speak Spanish is the most valuable gift I'll ever receive. There's a famous scientist who said ‘language is the lens through which you view the world’ and I think it's so true. The words that you use to define things are the lens through which you see them and if you're able to speak more than one language than you can see things literally in different ways.

I spoke in broken Spanglish when I was little; in sentences, every other word would flip. No one could understand me but my family. It was a little bit of a mess, but once I started going to pre-school fulltime I finally got my English down. My mom eventually put me into this private school (at the recommendation of her periodontist of all people) where they actually taught French starting in kindergarten. I was able to learn French and stick with it, I think because I already had the Spanish. So, by the time I graduated from high school, I was trilingual and then it was like, what can I do now? On to become a polyglot!

My mom traveled a lot and she had a trip to Brazil my senior spring of high school that perfectly lined up with my spring break. So I got to go to Brazil but I was locked in the hotel most of the day because she was busy with her meetings. So imagine this 17 year old girl shows up to the hotel restaurant. She speaks Spanish, and she's curious and she's stumbling over her words trying to order off the menu in Portuguese. The wait staff loves it and decides to try their best to teach me Portuguese over the course of the four days I’m there. They did a good job teaching me and I was hooked on learning Portuguese. When I was leaving they gave me my first Portuguese book and they had all signed it! After a while of studying Portuguese, I was able to read all the sweet messages they wrote me like ‘thank you so much for entertaining us, you were so kind and fun to teach, come back again and speak with us soon!’.

That year, for college, I went to Wellesley. It turned out that it just so happened to be the first year Portuguese was going to be taught! So I decide that I’m going to take intensive Portuguese. A year or so later, I wake up one day and it occurs to me I'm not ethnically Hispanic, French or Brazilian in any way. I am in fact, Swiss-German and German, so I might as well take some German classes too! The best/worst part of the whole story is that my dad’s actually fluent in German. He got a minor in German in college and is still really dedicated about his German studies. He orders German newspapers to our house even so it would have been really easy for me to just learn German as my first language growing up! Anyways, now I speak five languages to varying degrees. I think it really helps me connect with people. Not only because I can communicate with them but because, through language, I can see things from different perspectives, which allows me to empathize with their stories.

And if a white girl from California speaking five languages isn’t strange enough, the way I came to medicine is the TRULY weird part of my story. My parents both were raised in the same faith and that's called Christian Science. Overall, it's a really nice flavor of Christianity. If you look at the Text it’s a lot of positive psychology and affirmations. But also, a tenant of Christian Science is that prayer is most effective when NOT combined with medicine. So, my grandparents and my parents didn't get a single vaccine growing up. My mom wanted to go to Spain when she was in college so she got vaccinated because of her travels, but my dad feels personally abused by the religion. He got measles mumps, rubella, chicken pox, and shingles. My dad was a kid in the 60s and 70s when there were no helmets, no seat belts. For example, he fell off his bike and his teeth went through his lip. He swung really hard on a swing and a tree branch went through his leg, he still has a scar the size of a lime. And he never went to an ER, just used soap and water and prayer. And, ultimately, it worked out for him.

But I was a sick kid. I had allergies and pretty severe asthma. There were several times my symptoms got really bad; I would be covered in hives, my eyes were bloodshot, I was wheezing, and my parents were terrified and were like okay time to bring her to the ER. So, early on, I noticed that medicine made me better because I would get medicine at the hospital and I would improve and then I would take my inhaler and I would immediately feel better. I would go to church on Sundays were we were told ‘you don’t need medicine, just God’s love to get better’ and I was like, no, man! Cognitive dissonance crept in pretty early on. Like, I wanted to be on the same page as my friends and my family but I knew that something about medicine made me better! That’s what first piqued my interest in medicine, and ever since then I have just gradually walked myself in deeper and deeper. These days I am an atheist. But I still feel the church is really important for some people because science is limited, right? And so, when science can't answer the big questions in life, faith is really great.

If I could let my classmates in on the best secret I’ve ever learned, it’s that being perfect is not the most important thing in the world. As soon as I lowered my expectations and started accepting my flaws, my life got 200% better! If you just sit in your room studying all day because you're stressed, the stress doesn't help you get anything productive done. So you can choose to drop the stress. That's so much easier said than done, and I don't even do it fully. But just try dropping your expectations to the floor and every day will be a good day! There's a voice inside my head, my inner monologue, I know a lot of people have it. If you can sync up with that inner voice and become a team, oh my God it’s the best! You’re now your own cheerleader. My internal voice used to say such horribly mean things to me. And now it's like, ‘come on babe, you got this!’. I highly recommend all these things if possible and if you can't yet, at least stop studying at some point during the day and do something that you love because you can't wait to start your life after you’ve become a physician. You have to live your life now because you just never know what's going to happen.

What would you want to do with your life if you weren’t going to be a doctor?
Be a paleontologist. I love dinosaurs! Or marine biologist – I have a tattoo on my back of a humpback whale. It would be a hard choice.

What are some of your hobbies?
Oh, I like to joke that I’m a professional hobbyist. I was on a dance team in college and I love to dance! I also loved to scuba dive and make pottery pre-pandemic. The climbing gym is my new happy place.

What is a book you would recommend to our classmates?
The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle. It’s a cheesy self-help book but it changed my life. It taught me that I can feel emotions without judging them. He talks about just noticing how you feel and giving yourself space from your own judgement. And if you can act like a fly on the wall of your own life and lower your expectations you will experience a lot more daily joy.

What kind of doctor do you want to be when you grow up?
A surgeon!

What is your pre-exam ritual?
Dance party!

What has been helping you get through this pandemic?
Hobbies, getting outdoors, cooking