The Last 18 Hours

A lot of stuff just happened.
Mostly in my head.
Well, in real life, but the big stuff happened in my head.
You’ll see.

Yesterday I went to my attending’s house for dinner since today was the last day of the rotation. It was a nice house. What you would expect from a doctor. His wife was also a doctor. And of Korean heritage. Like me. This could be my life in ten(?ish) years.

I rode my bike there. It was a nice ride, straight north about 5 miles. On the way back I felt really, really alive.

Today was the last day of my medicine rotation. It was pretty uneventful. I had no patients since my elephantiasis lady went home yesterday. (Did I tell you I had a lady with elephantiasis? No, I told you about flesh-eating bacteria. Anyway.)

I was about to leave. I said my goodbyes to my team. I went to the conference room to get my bag. There were people in the room so I couldn’t go in. I went back to the nurses’ station to kill time. I snatched up a computer. I read some of the evaluations my interns/residents/attendings had written for me. Nothing surprising. I’m basically all bedside manner, no actual knowledge. :/ Oh well. Something to work on.

Anyway. I started logging some of my patients. (So the course director knows what kinds of diagnoses we’re seeing.) I needed to get the electronic medical record number for one of my patients. The first one I’d had here. He’d come in with shortness of breath and developed pneumonia. Which we treated. We sent him home about three weeks ago.

I double-clicked his name on my list.

A dialog box popped up.

‘Warning: You are about to open the chart of a deceased patient. Do you want to proceed? Yes/No.’

What?

In my head all I was thinking was

What?

I clicked Yes. All his demographic information was grayed out. I tried to search the encounters but after a month I am still unfamiliar with much of the computerized record keeping stuff.

But in my head I was still thinking

What?

I remember clicking around. I clicked on his Allergy tab. Which was about the least relevant thing in the world at that moment. But I had to click on something. I couldn’t just sit there and think about him being dead.

We sent him home on antibiotics. We followed the lung specialists’ recommendations. He was fine when he left. He was always grumpy when I woke up him every morning at 6:30 on rounds. He was very stubborn. But he always said ‘Ok, thank you!’ every time I left his room.

What?

I got in my car to go home. I didn’t know how I felt. I thought I might have been sad but I didn’t know if it was because I was supposed to be sad or because I actually was sad.

He was a person. Sometimes I get patients that I become really attached to and they become almost like a friend or a friend’s parent or something like that.

He wasn’t one of them. But he was a person. I took care of him. As best as I could as a bumbling noob of a medical student, that is.

I was about halfway home. Thiinking about everything. A lady pulled up next to me in her car and asked me if I knew where the county hospital was.

I was confused. How did she know I’d worked there?

Obv, she didn’t. But I was out of it. Coincidences didn’t exist in my spinning mind. I tried to explain the directions to her. The cars behind us honked. Why are you so impatient? I wanted to say. Did you know this lady needs help? I pulled over and got out of my car and gave her the directions. She said thank you. I said no problem.

I went back to my car. I happened to glance at her license plate. It was a Georgia plate, from Dekalb (the county in which Atlanta sits).

What? That’s where I went to undergrad. Another coincidence? What are the chances?

(Uhhhhh, pretty low, Rach… That’s why they’re called ‘coincidences’ and not ‘totally-expected-idences’)

Why did I drive to work today? I usually ride my bike. Was she going to see someone who was a patient of mine? Was she just going to make it in time to see them die because I had given her directions to the hospital? Had we ever crossed paths in Atlanta? In Chicago at the hospital? Or just on the road as strangers?

Was me giving her directions any different from me taking care of Mr Pneumonia in the hospital? Maybe less direct, but basically, I ‘helped’ a sick person who was / is going to die eventually.

Why did my patient die?

Why did that dialog box come up? What was the point of that? Like I had a choice? ‘Your patient is about to die. Do you want to save him? Yes/No.’ That would have been more useful. But I guess that’s the dialog box that pops up on God’s computer, not mine.

(I wonder if God would be a PC guy or a Mac guy. I bet Jesus at least would be a Mac user, that fuckin’ hippie. And it’d probably be because his dad was always a PC user and so he’d be trying to rebel. So therefore, by deductive reasoning, God is a PC user. What does that say about religion?)

(Oh shit, I didn’t even THINK about Linux…)

Why don’t I trust my feelings? Am I upset? Am I sad? Am I guilty? Am I angry? I don’t know. Am I confused? Yes.

I’m still processing everything.
But again, I feel… really alive.

I have the shelf exam on Friday. I have to study. I have to show the test that I learned things in the past three months. I have to prove that I did something other than make friends with sick people and talk to them about their life stories and pretend to know why we were doing the tests we did and giving them the medications we did.

My body is very, very tired. So tired I can’t even sleep. But my mind feels more awake than I think it’s ever been.

Maybe I did pick the right career path. Or at least one that I could learn to grow into. I don’t know. These are hard questions to ask, but I’m relieved to even be at a point where I HAVE questions to ask. The first couple months, I was so lost I didn’t even know what questions to ask, let alone find answers to them.

Everything is raw right now.