Elena Iliadis
Washington, D.C., United States

“Can I give you a hug?”

Her words cut through the air as I looked up from my music stand at the woman standing over me, her face flushed and wet with tears. I shot up from my seat, too stunned to mutter more than a quiet “Of course” before her arms wrapped around me. Ukulele still in hand, I wrapped my arms awkwardly around her too, and we stayed like that for several moments—two strangers, hugging in the crowded waiting room of an outpatient cancer clinic. I could not see much through the veil of her red hair, but in our stillness, I could feel her crying. Just before she pulled away, she took a deep breath and whispered, “I used to do music too.”

Nearly two years later, I still remember the grief in her voice as she described her life as a professional opera singer and music school director, until her cancer diagnosis forced her to step back from the career she loved. I remember her tearful smile as she confessed that hearing me sing, particularly in this space, brought her peace she did not know she needed. Most of all, I remember her words echoing in my head as I walked back to class that day, words that have been echoing ever since: “Music heals people because people heal people.”

That morning, like many Tuesday mornings before, I had quietly slipped out of lecture and made my way next door to the Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center. Tucked into a corner of the clinic waiting room, I unfolded my music stand, softly tuned my ukulele, and turned to meet the curious eyes around me. I always introduced myself the same way: “Hi everyone! My name is Elena. I’m a medical student here at Georgetown, and I’ll be playing ukulele and singing for you this morning.”

When I first began playing in the waiting room, I was simply thrilled to sing again. Going into my M1 year, I had made peace with my music career coming to an end. I grew up singing, from my Greek Orthodox church choir to high school theater to four years of college a capella. But between studying and the ever-present pressure of productivity in medical school, I had accepted that music just no longer fit.

Yet that same fall, while volunteering at a local senior center, I met Julia Langley, director of the Georgetown Lombardi Arts and Humanities Program. We got to talking about the program, and when she mentioned the group of professional musicians who perform at the hospital each week, I asked if she would consider letting a medical student audition. To my surprise then, and my utmost gratitude now, Julia encouraged me to stop by and play that next week.

From my first visit, Tuesday mornings at Lombardi became my weekly ritual, my creative refuge. For an hour each week, I stepped away from lectures and deadlines and into a room filled with real patients and their families, waiting with a palpable, grounding strength. At a point in my education when medicine often felt abstract and distant, these people brought me back to the humanity at its core.

Week after week, I witnessed how simple melodies could shift the air in that waiting room. I saw it in the tap of a foot or the lift of a downward gaze, a woman removing her headphones to listen or a daughter pushing her father’s wheelchair just a bit closer. I felt it in warm nods as I played a favorite, or the time I watched an older man lean back and close his eyes to the start of “Landslide.” When I finished, he turned to me with eyes still closed and whispered, “Play that one again.” Needless to say, I did.

Over time, those Tuesday mornings became something more than a performance. I began to recognize familiar faces, and I learned which songs resonated most. I laughed as I shimmied on my white coat to a makeshift chorus of “Good luck!” before an important test. I found solace in playing just days before I took Step 1of my licensing exam. On my last Tuesday before starting clinical rotations, I found myself unexpectedly teary, overwhelmed with gratitude for the people I had come to know from my small corner of the waiting room.

For nearly two years, I played soft renditions of “Both Sides Now” and “Valerie,” hoping to bring a moment of peace, or at least a brief distraction, to patients facing uncertainty. Yet it was not until I met the opera singer that I truly understood the weight of those visits. As she stood with tears in her eyes, describing the memories the music had stirred, I realized that my role there had never been about filling silence.

What mattered was that I had come to sit with them.

In a space defined by waiting—waiting for scans, for lab results, for news that could alter a life—music became a way of sharing the stillness. It was a gentle reminder, as patients arrived for their oncology appointments, that someone else was beside them, offering joy without agenda.

The ukulele was pleasant; the songs were warm and familiar. But it was the feeling of being seen, of being cared for simply because one is worth caring about, that stayed with people. In other words, “Music heals people because people heal people.”

I once believed music and medicine occupied quite opposite parts of my identity. Music was expressive and expansive, a place where creativity could take the lead. Medicine felt rooted in reality, where serious clinical decisions dictated serious consequences. For years, the two felt like mutually exclusive paths, awaiting a looming verdict of who I would become.

My time in that waiting room showed me otherwise.

What I found there was not a contrast but a continuity. In essence, music and medicine ask the same thing of us: our presence. To sit beside someone without rushing. To notice what is unsaid. To remain when the moment is uncomfortable or uncertain. Technical skills may guide our practice, but it is presence that sustains and connects us.

As I begin my final year of medical school, I carry those Tuesday mornings with me—not only as a reflection of who I was before medicine, but as a guide for who I hope to be within it. They remind me that before I can treat, I must first be willing to sit, to listen, and to witness.

These lessons from the waiting room, ukulele in hand and surrounded by strangers, are essential to the physician I am still becoming.