LIVING THE DREAM
Dr. Blonde tells me about a 40-year old patient that I discharged home this month, who bounced back the other day. I treated him for a bad viral bronchitis that got better without antibiotics. He came back a week later with a new bacterial pneumonia and is blaming me for sending him home without antibiotics (typical ignorance regarding the virus and bacteria).
“You did everything right. I’m just telling you because I saw that he had the number for Patient Relations (for complaints) written down,” Blonde warns me.
These things, these people, make me hate this job.
I shouldn’t worry though. An
administrative secret states that people who complain to the hospital aren’t
the ones who sue. It’s the ones who don’t say anything, until you get a summons
two years later, that do.
One of my older Scottish patients
gave me this rock. It’s from some place in
I gave him a diagnosis of rectal cancer, stage III (out of IV).
He told me some nugget of
information about its origins, but my memory lost it like a kidney stone pissed into
I’m going to wear it anyways. It will go well with my Corean temple guardian pin.
“Hmm, your record says you’re obese but you don’t —“
“I lost over a hundred pounds this year,” the formerly fat man on the surgery ward said the day after he got his second knee replaced.
“Intentionally?” I asked the inevitable cancer question.
“Yeah, I did it through dieting. Can’t exercise – I don’t have the knees for it.”
People who lose that much weight
are often left with leg muscles of giants. Unfortunately, the knees remain fallibly human.
(This is me with a few days off. As you can tell, I ran out of pictures
for this spot.)
I’m taking care of a middle-aged man who has been walking around
with a hemoglobin of 2.5 (“grams per deciliter,” whatever the hell that means). Normal is around 14.
It’s kind of funny in the sense that I probably have more red blood cells in my right arm than he has in his body. It’s not so funny in the sense that he has acute myelogenous leukemia.
“Do you … think his drinking caused this?” his doting wife asked pleading for mercy that was not mine to give.
“No, his alcohol problem wouldn’t have caused the leukemia, but … it might have made his anemia show up sooner since chronic alcoholism can cause bone marrow suppression,” I muse out loud.
In other words, maybe his
alcoholism led to an earlier diagnosis of his leukemia, thereby increasing his chance of survival. See? Sometimes my Corean side really does come out. Or maybe it's the latent alcoholism gene I am sure my dad gave me.
He’s got the neurosurgery Mohawk going on, complete with tubes, drains, and monitor leads coming out of the shaved half of his stitched cranium flap. He doesn’t talk. He doesn’t open his eyes. His pupils don’t even react. He’s fucked. He’s also my age.
Cartwheeled down twenty steps at his friend’s house, on his head, while drunk. The C.T. scan would have said “brain go bleed … a lot” if it were a Speak N' Spell. But wait, it gets better.
When the
The moral of the story: Don’t
drink and hang around stupid friends.
Being on a psych ward is like being underwater. No strange smells. No beeping monitors. You can hardly hear your own footsteps. The silence itself would drown you if not for the inadequately medicated schizophrenics who try to keep their balloon animal heads above it all.
“Hi, your psychiatrist asked me to come and see you about your blood pressure and heart rate,” I tell Mr. Angry, a 22-year old with a bandana where his eyebrows should be.
I check his vitals - normal. We talk awhile. The deaf psychiatrist. The forced curfews. The mandatory mealtimes. The neighbor howling all night and the Elephant Woman next who yells at every person, chair, and floating elephant she sees.
“Dude, look at that,” Mr. Angry points to Elephant Woman in all her polka-dot hot pants, tied shirt, and bulging adiposified glory, “I mean come on, how can I not be anxious here?”
He’s got me there.
“… and I just find out today that I could have left this madhouse days ago. The psychiatrist was waiting for me to say I was ready to leave. And I was waiting for him to say I can go home. Dammit, makes me so …. Sorry. Check my pulse now.”
I check it. It’s fast now.
“I’m not going to be putting you on any hypertensive meds. I think you’re just a normal guy in an abnormal situation. I hope things get better for you,” I tell him. He’s happy and I’m pretty sure his pulse is down again.
I don’t recommend that he stop taking his four psych meds though. That would be crazy.
Besides, he gets to leave. Some of us don't.
These days, I realize I am not the cure.
Between death, disease, and surgeons, I'm the buffer.
.