Attack of the Meconium
5:00 am, the first day on the night shift, / six deliveries completed and only one hour remains. / A call from the nurse says the patient in 14 is five centimeters dilated, / and so we enter the room to rupture her membranes.
5:00 am, the first day on the night shift, / six deliveries completed and only one hour remains. / A call from the nurse says the patient in 14 is five centimeters dilated, / and so we enter the room to rupture her membranes.
The clock strikes midnight and just like that, / she’s been laboring for 10 hours as expected, / time flies when you can’t feel contraction pain.
This piece is focused on the applications of empathy and compassion in decision-making. How can we distinguish between them? In its simplest form, empathy deals with feelings while compassion deals with understanding.
She’s overwhelmed with options, can’t even remember what they were, / so we decide to move on and talk about what family problems bother her.
I sit in the classroom, / staring blankly at the wall. / The professor has gone off once again, / regaling a story of some elderly patient’s fall.
Wake up a 5:00 a.m., / Cannot afford to be late. / It’s my first day of preclinical shadowing, / I want my first impression to be great.
We’re overloaded with so much advice, so many ideas on how to be a better doctor, / how do we decide what to follow and what to ignore?
Soon, we were jolted to attention by an overhead announcement, “Attention, code blue. Six south. Attention. Code blue. Six south.”