Foot in mouth disease

Requisition History: Hirsutism.

I remember writing a while back about how patients talk too much. I'd like to eat those words tonight please. No, the specials will not be necessary, thank you. A house salad will be fine, vinagrette on the side. And a bottle of your second cheapest wine, mon sewer.

So what happened? Did my patients read my post, huff indignantly and organize covertly to begin a health care system wide silent treatment? Fortunately, my readership is limited and this was not the case. No one's talking to me because right now I'm in radiology.

Whenever I wrote up a radiology requisition, I never bothered putting much information on it for the radiologist to read. I always figured that whatever the problem was, their well trained eyes would pick it up and find it anyway. Since I've started though, there have been no shortage of instances when I needed any kind of clinical information at all to help me figure out whether or not this patchy crap in the patient's lung was something to worry about, or whether there even was any patchy crap there to begin with. But those xrays won't tell you anything that you can't already figure out from the look on their faces.

I guess that's part of the reason why radiologists become radiologists; they don't have to deal with people. In radiology you'll never have those patients that can't answer a simple yes or no question without an A&E Biography style retelling of their life. At the same time, you'll never know anything important or interesting about the people under your care. Every person you see is going to be as informative as the unconscious drunk, the frontal lobe stroke, or the parentless 6 month old.

I realized that talking to people was a big part of the reason why I liked suturing so much. You get to sit down with someone for a good 10 minutes and chew the fat, find out who they are, where they're from. I met an Afghani refugee the other day with some pretty crazy stories about Afghanistan. I never would have known by looking at his CT scan.

So radiology's not for me. I like talking to people. I hope this rotation ends quickly. I don't envy that luminescent pearly white sheen everyone seems to acquire after their patients stop talking to them.