internal medicine rotation

I am so tired I can just fall asleep typing...
I just got off a 28 hour shift and no sleep. This is one of those posts to make you wonder if you really want to do this FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE.

No, seriously. I have gotten tons of great feedback from patients and their relatives. Living here sure has some perks. Not a lot of diagnostic facilities, but it sure gives your noggin' a jolt when you have to figure out a patient's Dx just on clinical.

I've been given enough bananas to keep a small chimp content for the rest of the week (patients go to public health facilities and don't have to pay, but they show their gratitude through small tokens, such as oranges, bananas, turnovers, sodas, water bottles, etc.). I really don't know if they're giving me food because they feel sorry for me (I must strike them as malnourished) or because it's their m.o. (someone fixes you up, you give them fruit).

Anyways, this is just to vent. I got home and no one was here to ask me about my day, so I took advantage of the newly opened forums, and here I am.

See y'all later!

 

Stormreaver:

we're not in mango season yet, but I'm sure that'll change in a couple of weeks.

In the meantime, I have a lot of fun with my patients, all the while trying to remember that they're not there to have fun, but to get well.

I do find it hard to help them get better when they insist that they do not have the means necessary to get good X-rays, sonograms and the likes. Even HIV testing is difficult for some, since some hospital labs don't carry them as part of their daily testing load.

Does any of this happen in the States? I am aware that with the ever changing politics of health care, a good deal of patients get short-changed in the care we may be providing, but I wonder if this is just a "third world" condition or if this is just socioeconomics...

 

I'm blue.

I had patient in one of the wards (congestive heart failure, dyspnea, pain in both lungs, mitral valve prolapse, etc.) Really awful cardiac condition. Haitian, +/- 47 yrs. old and all alone. His only known relative lives in a town that's 3 1/2 hours away from the city and he had no money.

He passed away this morning, before I got there for rounds. I feel terrible.

I try to tell myself that there's nothing to do, but I keep wondering if there's something else we could have done.

(For clinical purposes, I imagine that the dyspnea and pain were mainly from pleural effusion, which is probably also cause of death).

The worst part was that I had been following his progress for the last week and somehow hoped that something would turn-up to help him. <img border="0" title="" alt="[Frown]" src="frown.gif" />