Making the Rounds with the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at UNLV

KIRK KERKORIAN SCHOOL OF MEDICINE AT UNLV

Making the Rounds

April 27, 2021 Issue 279

Friends & Colleagues,

So it’s about to happen: On May 7th at 2 p.m. at the Thomas and Mack Center, the first graduating class of the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at UNLV will receive their diplomas. While COVID-19 social distancing and masking measures must be taken, the large venue will allow each of our soon-to-be MDs to invite 12 guests and also allows for faculty, staff, donors and honored guests to attend. All guests will be required to have a ticket for admission, which they can secure by RSVPing here. The event will also be live-streamed from the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at UNLV website. Among those we’ll hear from are David Skorton, president and CEO of the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), UNLV President Keith Whitfield and Dr. Mark Doubrava, president of the Nevada System of Higher Education Board of Regents (NSHE). Founding Dean Barbara Atkinson, the first woman to head three medical schools in the U.S., will share with us how a medical school dream became a reality. In today’s newsletter, we feature Addison Guida, one of our first students who interviewed for a seat in the Charter Class. Though a grueling battle with cancer has kept her from graduating this year, she is now on schedule to graduate in 2023. Her determination and grit in overcoming grave health issues, coupled with an even greater appreciation for the importance of compassion in patient care, are qualities she fully intends to use on behalf of her patients.

Marc J. Kahn, M.D.

Dean, Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at UNLV

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Medicine By The Numbers

Asthma

Asthma causes swelling of the airways. Symptoms include trouble breathing, wheezing, coughing and tightness in the chest. Asthma can be deadly and there is no cure for it, but it can be managed with proper prevention of asthma attacks and treatment.

Approximately 25 million Americans have asthma. This equals to about 1 in 13 Americans, including 8 percent of adults and 7 percent of children.

Asthma is more common in adult women than adult men.

It is the leading chronic disease in children. Currently, there are about 5.1 million children under the age of 18 with asthma.

Black Americans are five times more likely than white Americans to visit the emergency department due to asthma.

On average, ten Americans die from asthma each day. In 2019, 3,524 people died from asthma. Many of these deaths are avoidable with proper treatment and care.

Former UNLV Soccer Player Fighting Through Challenges To Become Physician

Although cancer delayed Addy Guida's medical education, she says the experience will make her a better doctor.

Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at UNLV student Addison “Addy” Guida, one of the first students to interview for a spot in the charter class, had long looked forward to the school's first-ever Match Day, when students learn where they’ll do postgraduate residency training in their chosen specialties.

When that day came in March, however, this former star midfielder for the Rebel women’s soccer team, whose goal is to become an anesthesiologist, wasn’t at the Shadow Lane campus to get the news with the students she started school with.

She watched a UNLV-TV livestream of the event.

Life, in the form of Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer of the lymph nodes, happened, delaying her dream from becoming a reality.

While her peers matched with robust residency programs both inside and outside Nevada, including Ivy League schools and Stanford, USC and UCLA on the West Coast, Guida could only watch. Her voice quavers as she talks about not being there for Match Day, not graduating in May with her original class.

“It would have been nice to be with this group that I started out with," she said. "I couldn’t help thinking ‘what if.’ But my excitement for what my classmates have accomplished overcame my personal sadness. They’ve laid down a foundation we can all be proud of.”

Twice in the last five years, Guida has had to fight off Hodgkin’s lymphoma, the last time at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. There, she was told she had to undergo a bone marrow transplant in order to survive. Her best friend, UNLV medical student Lauren Hollifield, visited her frequently in the hospital.

“That meant a lot,” said Guida, who received a full-tuition scholarship from the UNLV Alumni Association. “On Match Day I was so happy to see her and her husband (medical student Damien Medrano) got into the Ivy League’s University of Pennsylvania for residency.”

In the more than six months she spent in Texas, she said she was “sick beyond what I understood sick to be.”

Scared, she says, “beyond comprehension,” she received months of nauseating chemotherapy.

"Knowing that there is someone looking out for you like they would look out for themselves is a comfort when you’re fighting for your life. I want to provide that for others”

Addy Guida, Medical Student

“When admitted for my transplant, an anticipated three-week admission transformed into a hellish two-and-a-half month admission that included a nearly always fatal liver complication from which my oncologist said in his 35 years of medicine he had never seen a patient survive. I was brought to the brink, and for whatever reason, my body rallied.”

She started medical school again in 2018, planning to graduate in 2022, just a year behind her original class. But the challenges brought by the COVID-19 pandemic prompted her to further delay her medical studies, this time to complete an accelerated master's of public health degree at the UNLV School of Public Health. She is now set to graduate with the class of 2023.

She believes her experience with cancer will make her a better physician.

“My experience as a patient taught me patience," she said. "While working in the emergency department prior to getting sick, I often shared in the cynical attitudes of my co-workers toward seemingly irrelevant patient priorities — a dynamic that inevitably comes with the stress and necessary detachment required to be effective in that environment.”

"I did not realize, even remotely, how important those ‘irrelevant priorities’ are to someone trying to plan their life around their health issues whilst being completely dependent on what one person, the physician, tells them. Knowing that there is someone looking out for you like they would look out for themselves is a comfort when you’re fighting for your life. I want to provide that for others.”