SAUGUS — Rachel Bocchino was part of a class that made history this April.
The Boston University School of Medicine graduate was one of hundreds of medical students across the country who received their diplomas this spring, allowing them to join the ranks of healthcare professionals fighting on the front lines during the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, the lifelong Saugus resident said things didn’t exactly go as planned.
Instead of immediately accompanying their more experienced colleagues in hospitals and clinics, Bocchino and the rest of her class anxiously spent the next month waiting to hear about placements that never came.
Because many area medical centers didn’t need to use the flock of new doctors joining their ranks, it left some feeling lost as to what they could do to help during a major public health crisis.
“You sign up for medicine and all that it means, but it still feels scary as a brand new doctor — where are we going to be working? Are we going to be in local hospitals? Are we going to be at the hospital with our school? There was a lot of uncertainty,” said Bocchino, 27. “And then the hospitals ended up not needing us, so then it kind of became almost anticlimactic.
“Everyone has been thanking me for being a healthcare worker during this time, and I haven’t started work … That was actually kind of hard, feeling like you have the skills to help but then you’re not helping just because of where you are in your career.”
With her graduation date moved from May 15 to April 17, Bocchino, who also attended Austin Preparatory School in Reading and College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, quickly prepared to do her part, letting go of the celebratory vacation plans she had made to drive through California with her boyfriend, and instead readying herself to suit up for work nearly two months earlier than expected.
“You are becoming physicians at perhaps the most medically challenging time in the last century,” Karen Antman, dean of MED and provost of the Medical Campus, told the 190 graduates during their Facebook Live ceremony in April.
“Now, as a newly-minted physician, you will be literally on the front line of a global pandemic. This will change your residencies that you had planned, and this will change you.”
Although some may not have ultimately joined the front lines during the height of the pandemic, new physicians across the country are still bracing themselves to enter a vastly different and largely uncharted medical landscape.
“It’s hard to say what’s going to happen next,” Bocchino said. “I want to be a specialist someday, so it’s interesting to wonder what’s going to happen to specialty medicine now that all these clinics aren’t operating in person anymore.”
She added that being a trained medical professional during the era of coronavirus has not been without its frustrations.
“I think that lots of people feel like there’s been an overreaction. (They’re) not worried about their own health, and maybe no one in (their) household is sick, so this feels silly,” she said. “If you’ve never really been in a hospital or know what hospitals are like or know their capacities, then it all feels crazy, too.
“But I look at the amount of people that needed ICU care at the hospital I did medical school at, and I think about the building and the beds and the nurses there. On a day-to-day basis, I think about how hard they were already working and how full we already were. There was no way that some hospitals could have survived if we just let people go about their normal lives.”
Despite the highly unusual start to her medical career, Bocchino still has plans to begin her residency at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston starting June 23.
“I think the pandemic has been changing every single day, so it’s kind of hard to get your feelings in order,” she said. “It’s hard to say what graduating during this time has felt like, because it’s been a little bit of everything.”
