Thursday, January 23

medicine: wk3, day 19

i can't get over the restraints we use. it seems so inhumane, to tie up an old man. i know the reasons for them. we are afraid that they will get up out of bed and fall, and get a bleed in their head. or that they will pull out their iv's, as a lot of patients are wont to do.

but sometimes, the sheets are folded the wrong way, or there is an itch on one's nose. and the patient goes CRAZY. i can't blame them. i would flip out, too.

the particular restraint we use is called a posey. when i went to the supply room to grab a restraint, i looked at the box and saw where it came from: arcadia, california.

MY HOMETOWN!!! who knew?!!

i am irrationally proud that all the hot sauce in vietnamese restaurants, no matter WHERE you go, is made in rosemead, CA. now, i have another thing to be proud about. these super-inhumane restraints used in hospitals to tie down helpless old men are made in my very own hometown!

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when you are talking to a patient that tells you he can see the devil, and he suddenly shoots out his hand to grab yours, what do you do? you freak out and yank your hand away, out of his reach, that's what you do.

turns out he only wanted to grab a hand to put to his forehead, to demonstrate his fever.

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medicine is a lot like detective work. just like what encyclopedia brown, or sherlock holmes did. it's all about asking the RIGHT questions when taking the history, then coming up with a differential diagnosis. then you get the RIGHT labs, and use those results to narrow your differential, and perhaps expand it to include new possibilities.

at each step, you take information and make logical deductions. it's amazing, really. each patient's health problems are mysteries and puzzles to be solved.

the problem is that i am not encyclopedia brown or sherlock holmes. i'm more like buggs meany and watson. always several steps behind. unable to see some possibilities. slow to make connections.

i would feel absolute dispair, if not for this encouragement from my attending: "medicine is not knowledge you get from books. it's experience. the difference between you and residents is not the amount of studying they put in. it's the several years of experience they have over you." there IS hope...

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i was able to have dinner outside the hospital today. with 2 very special ppl. :D

an incredible rarity. the dinner out was so precious, i didn't know how to enjoy it fully. i must have been terrible company.

and embarassing as well. everyone else was dressed nice, and there i was, in my powder blue scrubs, white coat, and stethoscope. ah well... i lost my pride a long time ago.

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a pretty new york moment: walking home at 11pm, seeing snow flakes lit under a street lamp, falling slowly. after the pace of the day, time seems to slow down for such things. then my legs clad only in scrubs made their numb selves known, and i scrambled home.


yakob at 11:52 PM

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