During our time here at AMC, we, as PA students, the medical students, nurse anesthesiology students and others learn from donors' bodies as part of anatomy, surgery and other procedures. Over 300 people donated themselves to our program this year. Our PA class was fortunate enough to have benefited from 7 of them. Every year, AMC hosts a memorial ceremony to the families of those generous people who donated themselves to the future of medicine. At this ceremony we can meet the family members of those donors and maybe even get to know more about the donor. This is a great way to also thank the families for allowing this to happen, it is very difficult at the time of someone's death to allow for this and prolong the grieving process so we are very grateful and fortunate that we can learn from these donors.
This year was unique in that Dr. Crone was asked to have a PA student read the names of some donors during the memorial service. (since I check my email every 3 seconds,) I replied quickly to him and offered to take that position. It was amazing to see how many people came out to the service that day to remember their loved ones. It was even more amazing that we had over 300 donors who knew about this program and offered themselves up at the end of their lives. As a student and future PA, I could not be more grateful that I had the opportunity to learn from them. They too were my teacher.