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Tidelands Health Empowered Physician Scholarship: 2024 Winner

Congratulations to our 2024 Winner!

Henry Siccardi - 2024 Winner
Henry Siccardi

Henry was born and spent the first 13 years of his life in Astoria, Queens, New York City. As a teenager he moved to Fairfield, Connecticut after his father suffered a work-related disability. He returned to New York City in 2008 to attend Fordham University where he graduated with a B.A., double majoring in history and political science as a pre-law student. After a change of heart in his early twenties he transitioned to a career in medicine, putting himself through community college by working while a full-time student. He was accepted to the University of Connecticut School of Medicine, which he attended from 2018 - 2023. He continued working part-time through medical school while caring for two parents with lung cancer. He graduated with as a dual-degree M.D.-M.P.H. and co-founded the nationally recognized UConn Health Leaders (UCHL) program. He matched into Internal Medicine at the University of Connecticut and is currently a PGY-2. He is a son to his mom and deceased father, a partner to his girlfriend, a dog owner of two, a grateful friend to many, and enjoys hunting, fishing, and coaching kids' boxing. He plans on practicing primary care when he completes his training.


I am humbled by my selection for the Tideland Health Empowered Physician Scholarship and appreciative of the award. I plan on putting the vast majority of it into my emergency fund, which buys me ever-invaluable peace of mind. The rest will treat my girlfriend and I to a night at the theatre!

It is one thing to simply describe a rewarding or inspiring patient care experience but another entirely to convey why it was so.

So, for the purpose of this essay I want to briefly provide context for my most inspiring patient care experience by first rewinding time to October 2018. At the time I was a newly minted first-year medical student at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine. My mother had gotten the flu, and a chest x-ray showed a nodule on her right lung. Subsequent imaging and a failed biopsy attempt later, she underwent a lobectomy for Stage 1a adenocarcinoma of the lung over Mother's Day weekend, 2019. No chemo, no radiation – she did great. As with many others, early detection (even if accidental) not only saved her life but reduced the amount of treatment she needed. The pandemic followed soon thereafter and since both my parents had COPD in addition to mom's lung cancer, it was a tense time.

On November 10, 2020, during my MPH year and at a peak of the pandemic, my father had a strange episode of coughing up blood. This had never happened to him before, and his imaging showed "nonspecific" findings in his lung. He had been using the gas leaf blower and had not been taking his inhaler, so the doctors reasonably thought he had a COPD exacerbation, which would have been his first. Over the subsequent months he looked ashen and started losing weight.

The story then reads like a calendar of pain and loss. June 2021 the repeat CT scan was concerning for lung cancer. July 2021 was the biopsy and confirmation of his rare, aggressive lung cancer. August 2021 was surgery. October brought the start of chemo. February 2022 was the recurrence. March brought the biopsy confirming lymph node involvement. May 16, my parents' 30th wedding anniversary, was the second surgery. Two weeks in the hospital and a second surgery later, he was discharged looking "like a chipmunk" (his words, not mine) after his lungs leaked air. In June he started falling and having nighttime agitation. The brain MRI in July confirmed he had about two dozen masses of metastasized cancer in his brain. Radiation was begun emergently as he quickly deteriorated to the point where he could not even walk. August was our last time going out to dinner as a family. September brought pneumonia. October was initiation of hospice. On November 15th he fell into a coma on our couch as I cared for him. Finally, November 18, 2022 was the night, two years and 8 days after he first coughed up blood, that my father, my friend and my hero, left us.

But, you see, it did not have to be this way. My father stopped taking his inhaler because my parents could not both afford their inhalers. My father risked his well-being so his wife would not have to suffer illness. It is a scenario millions of Americans face on a regular basis. I often wonder if there would have been the same delay to diagnosis if COPD made less sense in the moment. I often wonder if that sacrifice cost my father his life. Whatever the case, the cost of those inhalers (a staple of basic healthcare) was too much for my family.

On June 17, 2023 the Hartford Courant ran a story about a UConn Health patient named Pellumb Medolli. He was a 71-year-old man from Albania. He spoke only Albanian. He had smoked for a long time and his PCP ordered a low-dose CT scan to screen him for lung cancer. He never followed through, however, until a student volunteer called him out of the blue. The volunteer, Sarah, was tasked with finding out why he had not followed through and helping him get it done. His daughter described that his insurance would not cover the scan. Sarah followed up with him to inform him it would be covered and called radiology with him and his daughter to schedule the scan. That scan discovered a nodule which was biopsied and found to be adenocarcinoma. Sarah referred him to UConn Health's financial services to help get his surgery paid for as well. He was staged at Stage 1a and underwent minimally invasive surgery to remove the nodule. Early detection saved his life and reduced the amount of treatment he needed, just as it had for my mother.

Sarah was volunteering that day as part of a lung cancer screening project started by the UConn Health Leaders (UCHL), a volunteer organization whose goal is to help patients improve health outcomes by having volunteers interested in careers in healthcare identify and assist them in overcoming unmet social needs. I co-founded UCHL in 2019 and was the visionary behind its creation. My goal was to inspire students early in their career to break down barriers to healthcare and make an impact on patients' lives. The lung cancer project embodies all I had hoped we would create. It was started by one of our outstanding volunteer leaders, Autumn Leavitt, now a medical student at the UConn School of Medicine. She had help from another outstanding volunteer leader, Meaghan Kennedy. Our volunteers included college students just like Sarah, looking to make a difference while they built a foundation for their careers. We provided them guidance, mentorship, advice, and nurtured their motivation. In return, they created an infrastructure as undergraduates that helped dozens of patients get their screenings for lung cancer and helped save Pellumb's life.

I have had plenty of rewarding patient experiences in my short medical career and ironically this one did not occur at bedside. I cannot help but marvel at what came of it. The experience inspired Sarah to pursue medical school. Autumn got to present at internal medicine grand rounds as an undergraduate and launched a screening program at a clinic in inner-city Hartford. The story inspired another UCHL volunteer to create a similar project in a gyn/onc clinic. Others have since created similar projects to improve access to breast cancer and colorectal cancer screenings. Four other patients have had early lung cancer identified and have a chance at life. Above all, Pellumb, our patient, was cured of his lung cancer and inspired to quit smoking. I cannot begin to express the joy that brings me. For all the pain in my heart, I am comforted knowing he and his family will get to enjoy that which I miss so dearly. The shared success of the patients, the learners, UCHL, and the healthcare system is the ultimate affirmation that we can make an impact on people while inspiring future generations of practitioners. That, to me, is inspiring every day.

Henry Siccardi

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