Can you hear me now?

Cardiology is not my discipline.

Frankly, as far as I'm concerned, cardiology and new age healing are on about the same plane. A cardiologist saying to me "Listen! Just there, at the left sternal border! It's very subtle, but you can hear it. Just tune in...let it unfold to your ear...you'll hear it, it's there!" is about the same as a psychic saying "Ah, yes, I can see it clearly. Your aura is pulsing blue and gold. It's lovely. Just spend some more time getting in touch with your inner eye and you'll see it! It's there!" It's not that I necessarily doubt either practitioner. I just can't sense what they're sensing, and I'm pretty sure that I never will.

The thing is, as a med student, I'm supposed to think cardiology is the acme of cool, even if I don't plan to go into it. I'm supposed to swoon at the thought of hearing a mid-systolic click and go into raptures at the barest hint of an S3 sound. I have a hard time mustering the required enthusiasm, and I'm pretty sure my preceptors can tell. But I'd be lying if I said I could hear anything special with that expensive stethoscope toy of mine.

And either all my classmates have far more acumen than I do, or they're stretching the truth a little too....

~isolde

Labels: clinic, frustration, school

See one, do one, teach one

Today was a good day!

I've been spending a lot of my summer in my supervisor's various clinics, and today I got to go watch him do some scopes (endoscopes and colonoscopes). He's been great at letting me jump in and get my feet wet, so to speak -- in his other clinics I've been (gasp) taking real patient histories and (faint) actually writing on real patient charts. Today, I got to direct the endoscope camera for a bit -- I think I'd be way, way better at that if I'd ever played video games as a kid, but as it is, I suck. So if you have kids and they like video games, never fear! It's actually good training for something! I also got to start a couple of IVs, the first with a lot of coaching from a very nice nurse, and the second with no coaching at all. I feel good about this.

The med school adage relating to procedures is "see one, do one, teach one". It's not an ideal -- more a description of how things tend to be. I don't know if that's a good thing or not, but I'm becoming gradually more confident in my ability to learn on that steep of a curve. I've gathered that, really, there's no way to prepare for the real world in these matters -- interviewing standardized patients and starting IV lines on prosthetic arms only goes so far. At some point you need to jump in. This summer has been great for teaching me not to be scared of that. Although I still am, it's getting better.

Have a good long weekend, everyone who has one.

~isolde

Labels: clinic, good days