Do you smell that?

As a (fake) doctor there are many aspects of my job that are really cool. It's a profession that most people respect, people entrust their health and lives to you, and most of the stuff I learn is really interesting. On the other hand there is one part of medicine that is less than glamourous and unfortunately there’s no way around it; human bodies are disgusting. You never know what your senses will be assaulted with when walking into a room. The other day we walked into a room where a person had a coloscopy bag (she was mentally/physically out of it and couldn’t control her bowels) and the smell was suffocating. Another day we walked into a patient’s room that’d been in the hospital for a couple of days and apparently (and somewhat understandably) had forgotten (?) to get up and shower. In another doctor’s office there was a patient that had an infection on his hand and after we cut it open the whole room stunk like crazy. Why, you ask, do I feel like it is worth a post to share with you these stories? Next time you look at a doctor (and to a greater degree Nurses) just remember the not-so-glamorous aspect of being a health care professional – it’s what we deal with on a daily basis.

My first week

So this week marks the first time that I actually have any say in a patient's care at a hospital. How much responsibility do you have? Well imagine letting your little child sit on your lap while you control the gas/brake/etc and teach them how to drive; about that much. Most of the time we're bored because we don't really get to do anything or have any responsibility. In any case we do get to interact and connect with real people instead of fake patients. Every morning we see our patients' chart, check up on them, then do it again with the intern, then do it again with our team of students and the real doctor. We kind of get to know them and their story. After we see them we sit down (the med students usually stand because we don't have enough chairs in the hallway and we don't really contribute that much to the discussion) and talk about their case, what tests we're going to run and what we think the actual diagnosis is. Usually this is fun (like learning fun, not ha ha fun) and we learn something, but today it kind of became a little too real for me. There was a patient with unexplained weight loss (which is never a good sign). Sure enough, today when we went down to surgery they took a look at his insides and he has metastatic cancer (metastatic means that the original cell(s) that became cancerous and started to grow uncontrollably have spread to different places of his body). The surgeon came out to talk with his family and had to explain to them that their father/husband would probably only have 6 months to live. I don't even know what I'd say to them, I don't know what we're going to say to him tomorrow when we come by to see him again. "How are you feeling today?" "I'm very sorry about this, we're going to get started on chemo right away." "Man, sorry about that metastatic cancer thing. How you doing otherwise?" Nothing really seems like the right thing to say with something like this, but saying nothing at all seems worse. I'm sure the doctor will have seen this before and figured out something to say, and for once I'm actually glad that I'm the medical student and not the one with all the responsibility.