Tag: patient story

Pratik Kanabur Pratik Kanabur (2 Posts)

Contributing Writer

Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine

I am a Class of 2018 medical student at Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine. I graduated from UNC Chapel Hill in 2013 with a degree in biomedical engineering. In my spare time, I enjoy playing basketball, running, and swimming.




Don’t Judge a Bottle by Its Wrapper

Published by Pratik Kanabur

“Ms. Mary is very excited to spend time with you,” the nurse said on my first day of hospice volunteering. From behind the nurse’s shoulder, I saw Ms. Mary rolling her power chair toward us, a toothless grin on her face. She looked up at me, her nasal cannula hissing with oxygen, and greeted me with her hoarse voice. I turned around to see that the nurse had dashed away, and left me alone to take care of Ms. Mary, who had heart failure, COPD, chronic pain and many other medical conditions.

Will

Published by Annie Robinson

How can doctors-in-training learn to have hard discussions with their patients? Will, a fourth-year medical student intending to become an internist, recounts two formative patient encounters he had during his third year. In the first, he learned from an attending physician and a man dying from cancer the challenges of determining when it’s time to end treatment. In the second, he realized a non-English speaking patient did not understand that she had lupus, and thus took the initiative to more effectively translate to her what the condition meant.

Fifty Shades of Care: Why Doctors Need to Pay More Attention to their Kinky Patients

Published by Christy Duan

On Valentine’s Day weekend last year I found myself at Paddles, the local dungeon in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood, for the first time. I was perched at the alcohol-free bar when a man politely introduced himself as a human carpet. He asked that I tread on him and lay on the floor to demonstrate. A professional dominatrix-in-training stepped onto his chest and buried her stilettos deep into his belly. His eyes were closed, and he looked calm — blissful, really. As a medical student, I winced, imagining the arrangement of his delicate organs in relation to her vicious heels.

Seeing Text Come to Life: The Case of Mr. X

Published by Jon Wolfshohl

I arrived at the neuro ICU at 5:30 a.m. to read up on my new patient before rounds. The resident on duty the day before had accepted a transfer at 7:00 p.m. and documented the following in his note: Mr. X is a 72-year-old male with a past medical history of severe bilateral carotid artery stenosis who had a devastating right MCA ischemic stroke at home this morning, confirmed by CT at an outlying hospital.

When Medicine Makes ‘Miracles’

Published by Jes Minor

“He’s had enough, you don’t want to put him through any more.” Dr. Acharya’s soft jowls folded into a cool smile, as though he hadn’t thought of acids unfiltered by failing kidneys. I dug my fingernails into my palms. Glancing at the bed where my grandfather lay, I watched his bare, gray skin grip the scar that split his ribcage in two. Behind his parted eyelids were unfocused blue eyes, glazed with whitish film. He hardly knew we were there — hovering over him — deciding whether he would have a chance to live and suffer, or whether he would suffer and die.

The Golden Rule

Published by Jennifer Yang

Inpatient neurology at UAB is a busy service, accepting a variety of calls every day from the ED, inpatient consults, and transfer patients throughout the state. On a particularly hectic Wednesday afternoon during my second week of rotation, our team received a page from the psychiatric ward that one of their patients, Mr. S, was being transferred to our floor after a possible seizure. The residents were busy checking out patients to the night team, so I was sent to see the patient first.

My First Ethical Dilemma

Published by Caleb Grote

It was Friday of the seventh week of my family medicine clerkship. I was tired. Tired from the day and, honestly, tired from the clerkship. I was ready for a change of pace. The next patient was Mr. S., a 30-year-old male, here for an establish care visit. I did not recognize the name. I reviewed his chart before the encounter, two visits in the system, both to the ER for cocaine-induced angina. I stereotyped him immediately. Not that this was right, but I did. I think everyone does.

Bedside Ethics: The Story of Jane and John

Published by Sean Sanker

The circumstances under which Jane and I met were less than ideal. That day, I had already seen a family of maggots making a happy living in someone’s foot and been chastised by my attending for failing to recognize the imprecision of my visual acuity in assessing a patient’s ascites — how else could I do so without a measuring tape in my pocket and daily charts of his abdominal circumference?

Cynical Yet? A Med Student One Year Later

Published by Malone V Hill III

I used to work as an anesthesia tech at a hospital in Austin, TX. I was surprised the first time a doctor asked me, his incredulous tone dripping with disbelief, “Why would you want to want to go to medical school?” It wasn’t the last time that happened, it wasn’t exactly making me excited to go to school, and it wasn’t a flattering reflection of the doctors that said it, but physician cynicism about the future of health care wasn’t something new to me, either. People fear change, but I think people’s perceptions about impending change are shaped just as much by their perceptions of themselves, especially the interacting dynamics between themselves and their evolving environment.

Pansies, Rosemary and Rue

Published by Erin Baumgartner

Truthfully, I pick her name off the new patient list because it belongs to a woman, and several of our male patients have already come upstairs flagged for aggression. It is too early in the morning, and late in the week, and I haven’t yet learned that female patients can be just as unpredictable as the men. I am in a hurry this morning, and I make the mistake of not skimming through her chart before I go in to see her. I don’t know any more than the barebones: her name and her chief complaint upon admission.

Remembering What it is Like Not to Know

Published by Katie Taylor

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.

Katie Taylor (6 Posts)

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.