Hershey Jayasuriya wrestles with her brother Amil, 16, at their mother’s house in Bloomfield Hills on Sunday. Jayasuriya doesn’t get to travel the hour and a half to visit her mother and brother very often because of her busy schedule. She was spending the day with them to celebrate her mom’s birthday.
Hershey Jayasuriya sometimes studies for 12 hours a day. As a second-year student in the MSU College of Human Medicine, she and the other students in her classes are expected to put all of their effort into learning about everything that can go wrong with a human body and how to fix it.
With hundreds of pages of information to memorize and exams looming that will decide her future as a doctor, it is a struggle to find time for friends and family or buy groceries.
“Even when I’m taking a break, I’m doing something else,” she said.
She noted that her situation is different than single medical students because she has to balance her schedule with her husband’s. She made a decision to extend her second year of medical school the summer after her first year. She got married to her longtime boyfriend, Adam Jayasuriya, and realized continuing her current schedule would give her no time to invest in her marriage.
“The challenging thing is how much she has to work and trying to find free time for us to hang out and do stuff together,” Adam said. “It seems like we rarely have any downtime. If we have free time, we see family and run errands or whatever … She literally seems to work 10-14 hours out of the 16 she’s awake every day.”
Hershey went to the administrators and told them she was concerned about having enough time for her relationship. They suggested she break her second year into two years.
“That was a huge relief for me, going from being regiment my whole life, saying ‘This is the next step, this is the next step,’ to saying, ‘You don’t have to go with the flow of everybody else,’” she said.
Jayasuriya said it is rare for a medical student to extend their stay in medical school. While her schedule is rigorous and leaves little time for anything but working toward her degree, most medical students complete the work she is doing in half the time.
After four years of intense schooling, students apply for residency where they work in a hospital under the supervision of a professional for 80 hours a week.
Battling burnout
Burnout — defined as professional distress in three domains: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and low sense of personal accomplishment — is common in the medical field. A 2008 study done by Dr. Liselotte N. Dyrbye at the Mayo Clinic found approximately 50 percent of 4,000 students surveyed from seven medical schools reported burnout.
Dr. Janet Osuch, an MSU professor of surgery and epidemiology and the assistant dean for the preclinical curriculum, said burnout is “one of the worst things that can happen to a future doctor or to someone already in the profession.”
Osuch attributes burnout in the medical field to many things. Medicine is a very competitive field and also creates a sense of self-sufficiency in students and doctors who tend to put their studies, work and patients above their own mental health.
Despite the high potential for suffering burnout, medicine remains a competitive field. Jayasuriya said the medical school received about 7,000 applications the year she applied and accepted about 100 students.
“Most students have a strong calling towards service and a desire to help others,” Osuch said. “The field is academically challenging, stimulating and fulfilling. Most students enjoy working with people. The social status is of course a factor, even if it is hard for students to articulate this. There are multiple opportunities for leadership and potential for making a big difference with one’s life.”
Finding inspiration
Jayasuriya was born in Sri Lanka and was forced to leave with her parents when she was 4 years old because of a violent civil war. She spent most of her childhood moving to various homeless shelters, calling 20 different places home before enrolling in high school.
Jayasuriya said this glimpse into the effects of poverty incited a desire to bring change into a world where she constantly saw people being pulled down.
“The situations most of those (people) are in, they truly have no other choice,” she said. “The assumption is that they want to be there, or that they’re lazy, but that’s really far from the truth.
“When people say, ‘If you really want it, go after something, it’s going to happen,’ it’s a little bit naïve in the sense that there’s a lot of people going after things and there’s limited resources. There’s going to be people left behind.”
Support student media! Please consider donating to The State News and help fund the future of journalism.
Jayasuriya said she remembers one girl as a child who lived in a room with four families and her young mother at a homeless shelter. She displayed the classic signs of malnutrition, Jayasuriya said, and she wasn’t where she should have been developmentally. She would sit on her bed in the corner of the room, coloring.
“I felt a kind of attachment to her because she was into art and she was really quiet,” Jayasuriya said. “Her crayons were all broken, and I was really picky about making sure my crayons were really sharp. I saw some people making fun of her and I felt really bad for her so I told her that we could share my crayons, but she had to use the side that was not the sharp side because I was a little brat about it.”
Jayasuriya remembers it was taco night at the shelter and she was helping her mom set up for dinner when she heard screaming and an ambulance came.
“She had passed,” Jayasuriya said. “I remember that because I never saw her mom take her to the hospital. Nobody ever talked about what her condition was or anything like that. The resources were just really limited, and it really haunted me that there is a breaking point for people. There is a window of time in which we can do something about it, and after that it’s too late.”
Jayasuriya was inspired by the physicians who volunteered at free clinics. She said she looked up to the way they seemed to genuinely care about the well-being and health of the patients in their care.
“At that time, the doctors were the closest thing I saw to what a successful person could be in my eyes,” she said. “On top of being such a huge contrast to the poverty that I was growing up in, it seemed like they were also really giving. Being in that situation and wanting to know more and having the means to help in a significant way, that was really life changing for me.”
Learning to balance
Many medical students draw on their compassion for people to get them through the long hours and stressful work. Jayasuriya said the students in one of her classes were asked when was the first time they felt compassion toward something, and most students answered sometime before age 5. Their professors told the students that a group of law students were asked the same question, and most students answered sometime after age 20.
“When you don’t feel, that’s when you know you’ve been really burnt out,” Jayasuriya said. “I believe that people are intrinsically good. The day I stop believing that is when I know I’m truly burned out. Maybe that’s my leap of faith.”
Jayasuriya credits her childhood and her experience in a free health care clinic with keeping her focused on why she wants to be a doctor. She said she tries to think of everything that she is learning in a practical sense, taking in information with the knowledge that she will have to use it to diagnose a patient, rather than just memorizing for exams.
“Working at the clinic made me realize this isn’t like any other schooling I’ve been to,” she said. “Always in the back of my mind now is that I want to learn not for my grades, but because when I’m in the clinic and I’m sitting in front of a patient, and they ask me a question it’s like, am I going to have the answer to tell them?”
