At 3 a.m., when most college students were asleep, James “Jamie” Crawford sat awake, listening for the distinct wails of pain from his great-uncle Morton.
Years later, Crawford, 23, who moved to Baldwin two months ago, received his white coat on Oct. 16 at the Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell. The ceremony, held at the David S. Mack Sports & Exhibition Complex on the Hofstra campus, marked a milestone in a journey toward medicine that began with caring for his dying great-uncle.
Morton had fractured his hip in a fall. According to Crawford, his age and other health conditions made him ineligible for surgery, and he was placed on palliative care. As Morton’s condition worsened, he required morphine, but Crawford said his visiting health care providers were uncomfortable administering the medication.
Crawford stepped in as his primary caretaker, measuring and administering prescribed doses of the drug to ease the pain that often woke Morton in the middle of the night.
The nightly task was daunting, and watching a loved one suffer took a heavy emotional toll. Yet during those painful hours, Crawford discovered a sense of purpose that redefined his future.
Financial hardship during Crawford’s teenage years in Ridgefield, Conn., had disrupted his education and affected his mental health. At 16, he lived briefly in his car. He withdrew from school and friends, his grades suffered, and he considered trade school to become an auto mechanic because college seemed financially impossible.
Then, his great-aunt and uncle, Judith and Morton Schomer, opened their home to him, offering the stability he needed to rebuild his life. Crawford enrolled at Rochester Institute of Technology, initially studying chemistry and physics. At the time, medicine was not part of his plan.
“I just felt like it was the least I could do,” Crawford said of caring for his great-uncle. “They spent a lifetime together.”
Caring for them gave Crawford a sense of purpose he had not felt before. “I realized that through caring for mostly Mort, but also Judith, that their gratitude for taking care of them blew me away,” he said. “And it wasn’t just the gratitude, but the satisfaction that I felt for knowing that I was doing something meaningful when previously I didn’t feel like I had a lot to contribute.”
Morton died during his grand-nephew’s winter break in 2019. When Crawford returned to college the following semester, he changed his major to biochemistry and began completing the prerequisites for medical school.
After graduating from Rochester in 2023, Crawford took three gap years, and gained some clinical experience as a medical scribe at Norwalk Hospital in Connecticut, where he documented patient encounters and medical data. He eventually became chief scribe in the emergency department, where he witnessed both the fast-paced intensity of emergency medicine and the heavy emotional toll it took on families. Crawford helped implement a comfort-rounding protocol, encouraging fellow scribes to offer simple acts of kindness, such as providing blankets, food and water, or adjusting patients’ beds.
Now he is a first-year medical student at Zucker. Micheline Laurent, a clinical assistant professor of medical education who facilitates small groups of first-year and second-year students, said that Crawford stood out for both his knowledge and his treatment of classmates.
“Jamie is a fantastic student,” Laurent said. “I was very impressed by how much he knew. He was always patient, kind, and very respectful of the other students in the group.”
Laurent said she challenges students to think quickly, communicate concisely and consider different perspectives — skills they will need when working with patients and medical teams.
“He does the right things for the right reasons, in terms of just trying to make the world a better place,” she said.
David Battinelli, dean of the Zucker School of Medicine and the executive vice president and physician in chief at Northwell Health, said Crawford’s background reflects qualities the school hopes to cultivate in its students.
“He’s obviously got a very special journey, with a lot less privilege than some of the other kids — probably had to put in as much or more work,” Battinelli said. “But he has the type of resilience and drive and grit combined with humanism that we try to nurture in all of our students.”
For Crawford, receiving his white coat represented more than the beginning of medical school. It was evidence of how far he had traveled from a period of financially instability that once left him questioning whether he would attend college at all.
He hopes to become an interventional radiologist, and to maintain the compassion that first drew him to the field.
“I hope that I love what I do,” Crawford said.“You hear a lot of talk about burnout in medicine, and I’ve certainly experienced already, like, physicians wind up kind of jaded, and I don’t want to be one of those people. I had a reputation in the ER for being kind of happy-go-lucky, and they were like, ‘Oh yeah, you still have light in your eyes.’ So I want to keep that light for myself. I can’t change the world, but I hope I can change somebody’s world.”
