Phew, thank god the DNC is finally over. That is, the Democratic National Convention. I've been distracted by endless speeches for the past few days. To be honest, I wasn't that impressed with tonight's speech from the president. He seemed maybe a bit tired. But Bill last night! Whoa! And Michelle the day before! Maybe the smartest decision of Obama's life was to marry that woman. I literally cried 4 times during her speech. But ok ok, now that it's all done, I can get back to what's important: work work work!
Yes, school has been pretty intense. Every afternoon when we get out of class, I start thinking how much time I have - after having worked endless hours in the lab, getting home at 2pm seems really wrong - and then suddenly, it's dark out and I am still looking at the same slide of the lecture from this morning trying to decipher one thing or another. So yeah, now I understand why our afternoons are free. We need every minute of them to study!
Ok, that is a bit of an exaggeration. I take very frequent brakes. Like right at this moment. Even though I have about 30 pages to read. But it's for our "softer" course, called Practice of Medicine. It's where we are supposed to learn how to behave as doctors. Not the hard science, the facts, but the grayer areas, like how to communicate better, what's a good patient interview like, how to make patients trust us, how to do a physical, and so on. Funny thing is, we have our first lecture tomorrow, on what apparently is the most important part of any physician's life: the patient interview. I say this is funny because I would have really appreciated it if this was let's say, last week. That's because earlier this week, we had to do what's called our first standardized patient encounter. Yep, everything in the country is standardized, especially when it comes to education. Not to complain or anything. Better than other methods I have seen.
So what is this standardized patient encounter? Just what it sounds like. They hire actors, train them how to behave with us (they are really good at acting like real patients), how to react to certain patterns in our behavior, oh and they all have a particular disease. Or a particular reason to come see the "doctor". So here we are, 15 med students in our 3rd week of medical school, all wearing our brand new (whitest it's ever going to be) white coats, and we line up in front of 15 doors, all of which describe a certain scenario. We can take notes, read the scenarios for a few minutes, then there is a mysterious overhead voice that tells us to enter the room. First lesson: you should knock! I only did because I heard the guy next to me do it first. Phew. Little things you wouldn't think of when you are nervous and doing this for the first time.
My first standardized patient was an older lady who had had a heart attack and could not quit smoking in the month since discharged from the hospital. I actually had a lovely time talking to her. I felt like talking to my Grandma. In retrospect though, I said some really silly things. I also didn't ask her some really important things. The other two encounters I had were not as pleasant. I felt awkward, uncomfortable, stupid, I wanted to seem more confident than I was, which totally backfired. In any case, it was a first experience, for which we got absolutely no training (I do understand they were trying to set a baseline for everyone, but come on!!), but still. I can handle the hard science. I can generally communicate with people. But when you are in a room alone with a middle aged man who is asking you about colonoscopies, well, some guidelines would have been nice.
Kind of felt like this:
http://whatshouldwecallmedschool.tumblr.com/post/23099936760/every-time-i-talk-to-a-standardized-patient
(Btw, this tumblr, #whatshouldwecallmedschool is pretty freaking hilarious!)
Ok, now I am going to read what I should have said to those standardized actors, excuse me, patients, the other day.
No comments:
Post a Comment