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December 23, 2005
Professions
I don't know, but medical school without patients. Hmmm.... Probably evidence of my own short-sighted, selfish desire for some immediately gratifying reminder of why I'm doing this, but I went on rounds today at the rehab where my wife works, and man! That was helpful. I gotta do more of that.
Yeah, there's were sad stories, like the 27 year-old mother who didn't go to the dentist when her tooth hurt, got an abcess, the bacteria got in her blood, parked themselves in her heart, grew, and a chunk of the new colony broke off and took a quick trip to her brain, where it lodged in her middle cerebral artery, cut off the oxygen to that part of her brain, and now she can't move half her body. So now she's had a stroke, open heart surgery, and a titanium butterfly valve in place of of the custom, home-grown, miracle of nature she was born with. The new one, it clicks. And she got that root canal she needed. And blood thinners for the rest of her almost certainly shorter life.
And sad, yet satisfying stories, like the five discharges, one of whom, by surviving her injuries, finally lived to see her abusive husband in jail.
But the whole thing reminded me distinctly of the difference between shore duty and sea duty. Officers on shore duty ride desks and have no sailors or very few sailors working for them. Hours are good, but everybody is a little uptight. In the fleet, hours are horrible. Really. Medical hours just aren't that bad by comparison. That's a whole 'nother post. But at the same time, at sea, something is right. Palpably, leading-sailors-is-what-I'm-supposed-to-be-doing right. Some feel it more strongly than others. Admiral Leidig showed me that once when he was a captain: "Niels, I gotta get promoted to admiral so I can go back to sea." Uh, okay, boss. But that's it. Same thing for me at the rehab today: I gotta get this degree so I can be here with these people, doing these things. I gotta go learn how to do a neurologic exam. Right now.
I suppose this is all very quaint to anybody who actually works in healthcare for a living, but hey, I'm just a first-year medical student.
Posted by Niels Olson at December 23, 2005 11:26 PM
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