Crescent Heart

New Orleans. The Big Easy. Crescent City. Three different names that all uniquely describe this new place I call home. I still remember driving through the city for the first time in ten years and being overwhelmed with emotion. Some of it was excitement, another part was fear, but above all, I picked up on a tension in the city, tension between where it is now and where it could be.

In our last block we covered cardiovascular (CV) pharmacology, which is historically one of the most challenging segments in the curriculum. We learned so much in the CV block, but the one concept that fascinated me most was remodeling. When the heart is failing, or losing its ability to pump blood to other organs, the heart muscle cells start to stretch and grow to compensate for the weakness. It’s almost as if the heart anticipates that this injured state is the new normal, and that it must find a way to survive in this new subpar condition. But pharmacology has taught us that there are drugs and other interventions that can reverse the remodeling process to help improve heart function.

Similarly it seems that even after twelve years, Katrina has put New Orleans in an extended state of remodeling, with many believing that this denatured state is how things will always be. However, with every Uber driver I speak to, and every random conversation I have, I can tell that the city’s remodeling is being reversed one person, one community at a time. The word “crescent” in literature means to grow or develop, and through my windows, the Crescent City is living up to its name.