So I just realized that I haven’t written in almost a week. School and my multiple extracurricular activities have been eating away at my free time and I’ve been so busy reading blogs that I kinda sorta forgot I HAVE one.
So I don’t really talk about my patients very often but I have had a couple in the last few weeks that I just HAD to write about:
Patient 1 is a 65 year old lady who came into the hospital because of a hernia. A huge friggin hernia. So I go in to talk to her and she looked grumpy but I gave her the black folk nod and she seemed to warm up a little. I’m asking her all the important questions and trying to get a history on her 15 past surgeries (and yes I said 15) when I get to the masectomy questions. It took forever to get her story straight about her past history because she gave EVERY detail possible. Down to “I was eating some cookies, they were oatmeal or peanut butter. You know I make cookies and sell em at the church” How about no I didn’t know and good grief lady its 8pm and I want to eat dinner!
Home girl starts talking about how much better she was post-masectomy (not uncommon for many women, especially those with later stage cancers). I must have asked her about how she came to the decision to have a masectomy (or maybe I didn’t ask) but she proceeds to tell me how she went home from the doctor to talk to her “friend”. She says (and I quote): “I mean I don’t know why I asked him. It ain’t his body. He can’t suck on but one at a time”. How about I fell out laughing! The ER resident working with me on surgery just smiled and kept on talking. I just had to tell her “you are a M-E-S-S”. I try not to get too “street” with my patients but she was cracking me up. That’s how I want to be when I get that age, living life, rolling with the punches. My grandmother is like that, 89 years old and she just rolls along. She is a joy to be around because she has now and always has possessed a joie de vivre (showing off my fancy french edumacation). She has a joy for life that is just infectious. It’s hard for me to be around people like my ex-husband’s grandmother who gave up on life 10 years before she passed (and she didn’t have nearly the medical conditions this lady or my grandmother had). That’s the reason I’m working on remaining upbeat even through my setbacks. The joy that comes from deep within is soooo powerful!
Patient 2 is a shorter (but stranger) story. He’s a 50 something year old man who came to the hospital for anal warts. Yep, I’m the queen of the butt problems. If they have a boil or an abscess on the rear parts, I am destined to work on it. Anyway. So we get to the room and this guy looks like hell chopped and screwed. He looks like he’s at least 65. He had a blood sugar reading so high he could be tapped for pancake syrup. But the surgery team wasn’t there to manage his sugar, we were there to see if there was something to cut! This guy lifts his legs and his whole genital area looked like a cauliflower patch. He didn’t have anal warts he had genital warts. Many of the warts were infected and nasty as all hell! It was so bad that one by one we excused ourselves from the room (and there were 8 of us total). I of course, being the twisted individual that I am was the last student standing. These mugs were infected and nasty (I know I know, you get the picture). We took him to the OR today and the head surgeon told the students that we couldn’t even stay for the case because the virus could aerosolise and get into our respiratory system, plus there would be such fumes that he would be wearing a special mask. Disappointed, I quickly left the room b/c the idea of cauliflower like stuff in the throat was yeah, a bit too much! But it just reminds me that you have to take care of yourself. How people have so much fear of doctors or lack of concern for themselves (this one wasn’t an insurance issue) is something I just don’t understand.
Well those are my tales from the bottom of the totem pole in the hospital today. It’s 930 pm and I have to pack for yet another overnight call tomorrow and get ready for bed! Toodles!
