Typical medical school for international health conversation

Me: Hi 3rd year! How's your year been?

3rd year student: Not too bad. I mean, aside from the war. Which was a little stressful.

Welcome to geriatrics/off to a swinging start

Enthusiastic first-day-of-a-new-rotation me: Good morning Mrs. C! How are you feeling today?

Adorable 101 year old patient: "That's enough. I would like to die now, please."


Perhaps geriatrics is not for me. . .

Memories of Peru: Baby Special!

At those prices, I'll have both!

I'm home!

Overheard in cute Cambridge coffee shop:

"Hiiiiii. I'd like a chocolate chip cookie, only if they're made without nut ingredients. No, not that one, a rounder one please, the roundest one you have. And an espresso, in a ceramic cup. ::to companion:: Espresso only looks right in ceramic, it allows the crema to expand. Oh, and a skoche of whipped cream on top. Thanks!"

I wanted to just hug him it was so unmistakably American.

::soaking it up for 48 more hours::

Hebrew manages to make oncology adorable

Today was a whole lot of the usual: Four patients, four different languages. One woman refusing breast cancer treatment because her husband and her rabbi decided against it. One woman caught early by her first screening mammography. One caught very very late with an 8x8 cm mass.

The cute part.

A mass, or lump, in Hebrew, is: Goosh. (Already cute, right?)

It gets better.

A palpable mass, or lump, is: Goosh namoosh.

Best language ever.

Sensitivity

Big Fancy Orthopedic Surgeon presenting a patient (after sauntering into the room 20 minutes late in jeans and a leather jacket and and deigning to grace us with a consult):

"Mr D is a 19 year old Bedouin man who was injured when a rocket landed on his construction site." ::with exaggerated eye roll:: "For some reason he wants us to remove the shrapnel lodged in his pelvis, elbow, and face. He says it causes him pain and is uncomfortable. He is on anti-depressives (sic), I don't know why." (My emphasis. I mean, really??)

Student: Why don't you want to do the surgery?

BFOS:"I think is no big deal, some shrapnel."

I'm currently on oncology, which does not seem to predispose itself to providing me with pithy little anecdotes.

I find it fascinating. The patients usually start the meeting by telling me their diagnosis, but I'm much more interested in the story of the moment. The moment when they went from being someone with an unexplained symptom that was "probably nothing" (that phrase comes up about 17 times a day) to a cancer patient.

Especially meaningful right now when it feels like every third person I know is close to someone who has just crossed that line.

The other thing I like is how absolutely normal the clinic is. Most of the patients are feeling relatively well, look well, joke around with us as we discuss how many treatments they're going to receive in what is most likely the last months of their life.

I also play a little game with myself as I watch the conversations. I try to see the hidden agenda in the patient's eyes. There always is one. They politely sit through discussions of dosing and risks of surgery and statistics and all they want to know is if it's safe for them to play with their grandchild this weekend or if they're going to be receiving a chemo treatment during their brother's bar mitzva in two months. This is almost always the "doorway question" they ask as they're on their way out of the room and their whole body just sighs once they get an answer.

It seems to be these little things that matter way more than where or why the cancer has recurred and how many infusions they're going to need and when to take their pills and what their lab results are today. Which makes sense, because those are the things that make them people, not cancer patients.

So the summary is, I dig it here.