Socks
A pair of Navy socks on pale, scrawny legs — that’s what I remember about him. 0300 hours in the ED and the umpteenth “What brings you in tonight, sir?” and suddenly all the patients start to meld together.
A pair of Navy socks on pale, scrawny legs — that’s what I remember about him. 0300 hours in the ED and the umpteenth “What brings you in tonight, sir?” and suddenly all the patients start to meld together.
“What’s the matter with everybody?” asked Mrs. Palmer, a hopelessly demented woman with water wells for eyes. She had just endured her third consecutive tongue-lashing by the bulldog masquerading as a nurse anesthetist.
One of the visions of in-Training has been to raise awareness of the significant issues affecting medical students across the United States and internationally. Yet, when we focus solely on our needs, we often fail to see and appreciate the patient perspective.
they are / people first / more than just numbers and / statistics on a computer screen
I met Rosa on my first rotation. My clinical year began with overnight shifts on the obstetrics and gynecology service at an affiliate hospital. My second night was halfway over when, at two in the morning, Minnie and I were summoned to the emergency department.
Medicine has passed through many shifts in paradigms throughout its development, starting from the first establishments of hospitals and medical centers in the 1800s to the human genome project in the early 2000s. Such events changed our perspective on how we study diseases.
Palliative. End of life. Dying. How do we care for patients at this stage of illness?
The morning that we met was one most medical students eagerly anticipate as they embark on the journey that is medical education. Excitedly I put on my first set of scrubs, elated to look like a “real” doctor. Beneath my external façade however, I was masking an underlying feeling of anxiety.
I come from a family of repeaters. We repeat the questions that had unsatisfactory answers, the jokes that got particularly good receptions, the requests willfully ignored, but most of all, we repeat the stories.
I’ve heard it said that knowledge is power, and that to be forewarned is to be forearmed. I still remember getting a text from my mother when I was on my OB/GYN rotation, during the first window of time I had gotten to use the bathroom all day. I remember her texting me a picture of a CT scan of my grandfather’s lungs with the words: “What does this mean?”
I spent the first week of my outpatient experience in internal medicine working with the nurses at Hospice of the Red River Valley in Fargo, ND. Besides being incredibly nervous to begin my third year of medical school, I was anxious about what I might encounter on my week at hospice.
“Be a duck,” became my mantra throughout medical school, so much so that my mother had it printed onto a canvas and has it hanging on a wall at home in my honor. As a medical student you might think I would be more interested in having the prowess of a lioness, the elegance of an eagle, the speed of a cheetah or the energy of a dolphin. A duck, as most envision it, does not have much appeal; except, however, when swimming. The quote that led me to emulate the duck is Michael Caine’s, “Be a duck, remain calm on the surface and paddle like the dickens underneath.”