Courage

The other day one of my friends remarked how scary it must be to be at least partially responsible for people's lives in the hospital, and how medical students are either all crazy brave or crazy crazy to do it. While I can't say for certain I'm not crazy crazy, I don't think I have to be particularly brave to take care of patients. What you have to be crazy brave to do is to be a patient being cared for by me.

All the patients I've seen don't put up a fight. "Hi my name is X, I'm a clerk and I'm working with Dr. Y today. I'm here to do a bit of a workup before he comes in..." and they all acquiese with little more than a smile, a grunt, or in the case of that frontal lobe patient the other day "JESUS FUCK OFF JESUS FUCK OFF JESUS FUCK OFF". Since he was saying that to everybody, I didn't think he really minded me working on him.

If it was me on the other side of the clipboard though, I think I'd have some problems letting a clerk suture up my face, or do superficial surgery over my lungs. Sure there's a real doctor making sure everything's going well, and sure the clerk's probably a smart cookie... but it's me we're dealing with here.

So thanks, patients. Thanks for letting me learn.

Thanks to the man with the huge abscess who had pain while I drained it because I didn't anesthetize a large enough margin around the site. Because of your suffering, the next patient I had that needed to be drained didn't feel a thing because I froze her like a wrist shot from center ice freezes Andrew Raycroft.

Thanks to the guy who tore his hand open on a rusty nail. Because you let me put in the stitches, I learned how much of a pain it is to need more sutures after you've used up all the ones you have.

And thanks to the man who let me feel his prostate. Again. It's already unpleasant enough having it felt once, but you sucked it up and now I have a better idea of what a normal prostate feels like.

All of these things I've learned are lessons that I wouldn't have learned in lecture, or by taking notes while someone else did it. I don't think patients understand how helpful it is to be able to do some of the things they let me do on them, so to those people, I say, thank you.

Now turn your head and cough.