Swamped

To use Katya's oh-so-apt description in her comment on my last post, I have been absolutely swamped this past week. The nice thing about second year is that the week after our exams (which I did quite well on) we have a week of nothing but ICM--which essentially means we show up for class and do nothing else. It's lovely, and I read three books just for pleasure and wallowed in the normalcy of it all--coming home at 4pm, watching tv, having dinner, hanging out with D, all that. Unfortunately, the first week back to legitimate studying has been sort of a slap in the face.

We started the week with lung pathology, which was the worst bear of a subject to get through, mainly because the professor was completely incapable of paring down the material--the first two lectures (one hour each) contained a grand total of 187 powerpoint slides. I mean--really? It took me about 4 hours just to slog through the material that day.

Once I got through that, however, the week has been alright, if busy--we started genetics, which I always enjoy, and are starting to learn about all the nasty bacteria that cause all the nasty diseases in micro, which is actually kind of cool. I precepted twice this week and actually knew what was going on with a few patients. It's probably silly, but I still find it utterly fascinating when I'm actually in the hospital and people are throwing around words and phrases and ideas that I've just learned about in class--it's a moment where my brain just sits there thinking, "Wait--this actually happens? In real life? To real people??!!" Too cool. Except, of course, when you realize that the disease that does actually happen in real life to real people is metastatic lung cancer.

In my preceptorship time yesterday, our first patient of the day was a middle-aged man who had been at work and had a seizure. They brought him to the emergency room to do a CT, and discovered that the seizure was caused by a spot in his brain that was probably a metastasis from lung cancer (which he never knew he had). When we arrived in the room to talk to him and his wife, we were basically explaining the biopsy that would occur later that afternoon to confirm the diagnosis. He was actually quite calm and understanding--his father had apparently died of the same thing, and he understood that we were not talking cure but comfort, and that he was looking at months (if not weeks) to live. His wife did not take it so well--she held herself together, but it was clear that she was terrified, shocked, bewildered by the sudden new direction their life had taken. What do you say to people when you're discussing their imminent death? The doctor I worked with was fabulous--exactly the right amount of kindness, understanding, and honesty I hope I can someday offer to people who are having the worst day of their life.

Of course, the weird part is you participate in something like that, something that has stopped that patient's world on a dime--you talk, and listen, and console, and offer advice--and then you go back to your day, back to the other patients and the studying and the work. It's a strange world, this doctor business.

Luckily, to shrug off the utterly depressing experience, my sister came home from college this weekend for the fall festival in our town and we're all going there for lunch today to pig out on elephant ears and chicken and dumplings and doughnuts. Thankfully, this will occur before my lecture on heart disease next week, after which I will probably never be able to eat fatty foods again. :-)