A bit of a short entry this week everyone. Suffice to say that
I'm only four weeks into this trimester and I'm spent. After three
years of classroom instruction, I'm tired of sitting in class and
listening. Fifteen weeks of intensity followed by two weeks of
absolute nothing, repeated 12 times and three more cycles of this
before graduation. I revel in the lab time we have between our
simulated patients, physical therapeutics lab and observation in
the clinic.
Yet, each time that I feel that I have had enough and I'm ready
to pack things in and return to the banking world, an unexpected
event occurs that rattles me back to the reasons I entered this
field.
We had a simulated patient this week who presented with a chief
complaint of depression. My lab partner (a chiropractic student)
and I proceeded to take the case asking the usual questions and we
noticed that the patient really wanted to talk. So, at that point,
without any signal from each other, we simply started a
conversation with our patient. We used phrases such as "Can you
tell me a little more about this situation?" or "How does that make
you feel?" Once we had the flow of conversation, we were able to
hear the patient's history, understand where she was coming from,
and determine the timeline of her depression, her history of
medications, successes, failures, and how she feels in the present
moment.
After the session, the simulated patient has the opportunity to
give the students verbal feedback for about five minutes. She told
us that she had never had students who were more genuinely
empathetic and covered so much ground in the 45 minutes of the
initial intake. All with a simple conversation. The relief I felt
was profound!
I was coming directly from taking a quiz in the previous class
that I was convinced I was ready for but ended up missing a couple
of questions (not bad, a couple), yet I was ready to ace it! I was
feeling like my best effort just wasn't up to par. Then immediately
walking into a room with a patient who is presenting with
depression and being able to make them feel heard, valued and
optimistic that we could help her (without making any promises to
her) reminded me that was why I am becoming a doctor - to help
others regardless of the confidence, regardless of "having a bad
day," to trust my training and my ability as a human being to
connect with other human beings, and to get to the root cause of
the illness, and next, working from that root cause to get the best
outcome possible for the patient. That's a pretty good
feeling!
Finally, I did a lot of work on the Gathering this weekend. I
spent some hours building a slide show for the video display in our
bookstore window. The slide show will display information on the
Gathering, the symbols of the Gathering, its history and the
speakers for this year.
I was also able to complete one of the wreaths for display
during the event on the stand I showed you last week. This wreath
is for Dr. Gerald Farnsworth (one of our oldest surviving pioneer
NDs who was part of the startup of NCNM) to place on the stand
during the opening ceremony. That's right! The wreath has a big "E"
woven into it and the "E" stands for Elder, and I'm grateful for
the Elders of our profession who paved the way and built the model
of connecting with other human beings. A noble reason for being a
doctor, and more so, to simply be a good person.