Columnist
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
Katie is a Class of 2016 student at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, in New York City.
Pleural Space
Pleural Space looks at the experiential curriculum of medical school, the many things that are taught and learned that aren’t listed in a syllabus.
On the first day of my surgery clerkship, our chief resident gave us a few instructions for our next two months together. We had to carry certain types of gauze and tape in our soon-to-be overflowing white coat pockets, create a clear and confident daily plan for each patient we followed, and be ready for rounds at 6 a.m. the next morning.
A few weeks ago, I was describing my team’s discharge plan to the patient I had been following all week. We had found an anterior mediastinal mass on imaging, and the pulmonologist wanted to follow-up in a week after immunohistological staining came back. I told him we felt he was now stable, and that we would like him to follow up with the lung doctor as an outpatient within the week. He asked me if he should return to the ER to get his appointment.
She asked me if I was from New York. I told her I wasn’t. I was from California, actually, but enjoying myself in New York City while I was here. I asked her where she grew up. She said Brooklyn. She asked to see my referral card. I asked her to clarify. She said she wanted to see my referral card. For coming here. And did the super know I was here? Where was my card?
The pathologist is doling out defective baby hearts from a dripping plastic tub. A few drops splash onto the student next to me. The pathologist claims it is just water. Water, and dead baby heart juice, that is. All of these baby hearts have congenital defects, and the ones we hold now each have a ventricular septal defect, a big hole in the middle of their heart that killed them. We have been allotted fifteen …
I’m sitting in a class on dementia. The doctor is lecturing about the condition’s prevalence, prognosis, neuropathology, diagnostic criteria, risk factors, deterministic genes and pharmacologic treatment. On a slide entitled “Non-pharmacologic Management,” the doctor tells us that dementia often leads to wandering. Half of those who wander and are not found in 24 hours are found dead. To try to prevent patients from wandering far, some assisted living centers have installed fake bus stops. When …
One eye is open as they velcro her legs into the stirrups. I ask the anesthesiologist why that is. He says he thinks it’s because she’s exophthalmic, the medical way of saying she has bulging eyes. Her hips writhe as they insert the long, slender, metal dilators to force open her cervix. They are reflex movements, they say, she won’t remember it, she isn’t in pain. She lifts her pelvis up and off the table …
Columnist
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
Katie is a Class of 2016 student at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, in New York City.
Pleural Space
Pleural Space looks at the experiential curriculum of medical school, the many things that are taught and learned that aren’t listed in a syllabus.
