Name:Anh Dzung Country:United States State:Virginia Metro:Fairfax County Birthday:3/28/1983 Gender:Male
Interests:Photography, Writing, MTN biking Expertise:"Is not love not unlike the unlikely not it is unliken to?" -Leon Phelps Occupation:Student for dayz
Every door is locked. All of the patient's rooms, the stairwells, even the bathrooms. Welcome to the mental hospital.
I guess I got a little lucky; I'm the only student on my floor, which means I get to see everything. I also have the most interactive attending to work with; in fact, I have two of them. Lastly, I also have pretty interesting patients. The bad/scary part is that all of the patients, all 20 or so of them are jail birds.
The people you see on TV having sex with kids or robbing stores—yup, they're right there. It's not too bad. Every now and then, which is pretty much everyday, the alarm goes off. It's not your typical fire alarm. It's the “oh crap, someone's going nuts. We need staff help” Alarm.
One of my patients introduced himself as God. So I call him God. When I was asking him questions, the guard that was watching him started laughing. “OK, see now I got to step up the powers here. You should be on fire right now.” Then I started to smile. “See, if I had my powers, I'd take the glasses right off your face.” So God's pretty much the one I feared the most, and I got assigned to follow him. When I first saw the guy, he was all chained up in his orange jumpsuit. I'd be talking with another patient, and he would just start laughing, and then stare blankly at me. I honest to Real God, thought that he was going to violate me and/or kill me. I soon found out that, he's not that bad. He's not one of “those people.” He was laughing because he was hearing voices—no big deal right?
But he's not as bad as the bipolar guy, who thinks we're trying to hurt him. He doesn't want to take his medicines. I used to have a good rapport with him, unless I tried to convince him that he needed his medicines. He told me to “Fuck off” and then announced that he was no longer going to donate his estate to the “Communist Republic of Vietnam.” At first, I thought he was kidding, unless he showed me his will. It was in a sealed envelope with something like “Colace” written across the top. He ripped it up, threw it in the trash, and gave me the middle finger.
I wasn't paying too much attention to The Communist, because I was talking to another patient. He's a nice guy. It's a damn shame that he's being controlled and having his genitals sexually assaulted by a computer in Texas via telepathy. But really, he's a nice guy.
I bought it at the same time that the rest of the class did. I don't think I'll ever buy from this company again. It's "clear-red," refurbished, and half the time I don't get the pages I'm supposed to. Sometimes it goes off in the middle night with the same call back number that merely translates to "trauma alert." I've learned to sleep through it; I don't even notice it anymore.
It went off one day in the afternoon, which surprised me. And even though it was only 1:00pm, it was already a long day, considering I got up at 3:45 in the morning. It must have been a special page, because though I was paged a number of times before that, it was the only one I got that day. Trauma alert. I'd be willing to bet that it was another car accident.
She came in unconscious, all wrapped up like all the others, tubes sticking out of all extremities. What caught my attention was this one tube that basically ran straight into her lower leg bone; I never thought I'd see one of those. Airway clear. Lungs working. Pulses felt. They took the X-rays. Usually I have to leave the room or hide behind someone with a lead shield. There are other times when things are so hectic that I don't even know that they were taking them; I don't even know how many times my thyroid and testicles were blasted with X-rays. But this time I was all gowned up with mask, hat, lead shield, etc. My friend ran off to radiology to get the films. So I stood there waiting with the rest of the team trying to maintain the woman. I looked at the heart monitor when she first same in, 100 beats. Now it was 70; maybe we were getting somewhere. I mean, that can happen when they start running fluids. I closed my eyes to "stretch them out"-- 34 beats. By the time I could process what was going on it dropped to 0. I didn't really think about it, because it happens all the time; the monitor probe falls off the finger or the signal's bad. I looked at her finger--hmm, probe looks ok to me. Still 0. The guy next to her starts pounding on her chest. The X-rays come back-- the right lung is completely whited out. It must be blood. The nurse dumps what looks to be a gallon of iodine on the woman's chest. Two doc's behind the nurse flank the patient and start tearing into the sides of her chest. One doc's going for the right lung. The other doc is trying to tear through to the heart on the other side of the patient. Blood shoots out from either side of the patient. The monitor is still flat-lined.
"She's gone. Good job though, team. Someone call it." "Time of death: 1:30 Alright, I gotta go back to the OR. I need you and the other med student to stitch her up."
As we sew up the holes in the sides of her chest, her face becomes more and more blue. With every progressive knot that I tied, I can feel her skin become increasingly colder.
My friend asks me, "do you realize that just an hour ago, she was talking and going about her daily business, and now she's dead?" "Yes and no."
I was confused and speechless. What was I supposed to do now? It all happened so quickly that we didn't even know her name or how old she was. There was no one cursing God for taking another one. There was no music. There were no slow motion action scenes. There were no tears from one single person in the room--not even from the two med students standing next to her.
In the past two weeks, I've logged about 1300 miles on my car. I'm now 1200 miles over my last oil change. I basically fill up every other day. Where have I been going? Well, from school, I commute to JMU and the surrounding cities every day for work. There was that day trip to Richmond to watch Transformers. I dodge trucks on the Interstate, and basically burn up my gas tank. I spend a lot of time thinking in the car, and I see some things as well. Here's one...
Virginia is a pretty nice place to drive through.
I like the sights that I take in on my daily commute. But then there are things that cannot be unseen.
Here we have the World's Ugliest Car
To pass the Virginia State Inspection, I had to get new tires for the rear of the car. Oh, what's that little silver dot?....
Hey, that looks like a nail in my one-week-old tire. I took it to the shop in the middle of the day on my lunch break, and my brand-new tire needs to be replaced. Lucky for me, I bought that tire protector thing.
Even though, I'm working long hours. I still need to eat...
Medicine is a Business.People get sick.People suffer.People die.Write up your note.Next Patient.
*For the sake of not outing any one person, a lot of this is just from general observation and not from a particular time period.*
Having spent a decent amount of time in the offices and hospitals, I’ve realized a lot of things.For one, those times when we had to do practice History and Physicals (H&P) in Clinical Medicine (PoM) is a lot like the real thing.Some of you might know what I’m talking about—a row of students standing outside of a patient’s room, pick up the chart, look at the chief complaint, open the door, and go at it.
I’ve seen some things.I’ve smelt some things.Some things, mind you.But from what I’ve seen and smelt—wow.But it’s not that big of a deal anymore.I just deal with it.Will ya look at that—here’s a man that’s so morbidly obese that he’s got diabetes, his joints are worn to hell, can’t feel his feet anymore, and is going blind.Oh yeah, don’t forget that he’s about the my dad’s age.
When I was with pediatrics, I used to be bothered by having kid-patients, who are too young to know right from wrong, afflicted with these awful diseases.After a while, I got used to it.(Read: 30-40 seconds per patient, at most).Call me insensitive, but I call it work.Health care workers just don’t have the time and the energy to be spent pining over the problems that these problems.We’re trained to help people, not person.I mean really, you’re going to die at some point, and the planet is warming up so quickly that future generations are going to burn up before their time is due.But do you dwell on it?Do you stop driving your car completely?No.You just think for a bit, know that something needs to be done, and hope that whatever you’re doing, it’s working towards something greater.
Granted the average medical student has more time to spend per patient, seeing as how we don’t care for that many to begin with.I thoroughly enjoyed getting my patients blankets, talking with them about their condition, or giving stickers and doing magic tricks for my kids.But damn, work is work is work is work.And suffering and death is suffering and death.
Over the past month, I’ve watched how people deal with all of this.A lot of people just treat it like a job; they do their work and go home.Others work it into the rest of life with drama and laughter.I’ve seen people text-paging their friends about how hot the nurses are on their floor or just making secretly making fun of the patient who had mistaken his wife for a hat.But what really made me stop and think was listening to these two people talk.
“So what happened with Mr. [Person] in 405?”
“He’s dead.”
“Really?” ß no real reaction
“I’m just kidding.”
“[lol]” ß real reaction
Or…
“Man, I’m so hungry right now.”
“You know when I was an intern, when a patient died, we’d order a regular meal, and eat it for them.”
“Oh, Lord, Dr. Such&Such.That is awful.”
“It’s not that bad.We’d wait for him to die first before we ate it.”
*Myself thinking* - I should try that.
That latter one seems pretty off-color, but I know that when I’m an intern, I probably wouldn’t be above doing that.
One of my earliest memories of medicine was a story that my mom told me.When she was post-partum with either myself or one of my brothers, she was with an intern.He asked to have the rest of her half-drunken milk.And you’d think that if you really wanted to get food, you could just go downstairs and get some.
Not so much.Life as an intern seems really, super-duper crappy.There was one intern I worked with.Though some might disagree, I could see through her tiredness that she was really pretty, which was later confirmed by her ID picture taken at the start of her intern year.She was probably one of the more attractive physicians I’ve seen in a long time.There was one night I was on call with her.It was about 6-7pm, which is early in a call night….
She looked like crap.Terrible.Her hair was all over the place.Her eyes were all baggy. Her body was tired. Her voice was tired.Her walk was tired.She looked like she had just gotten the crap beaten out of her in her way to work.I saw her a few days later on a regular work day.She had a smile on, kind of, but she still looked like she’d been punched in the face a few times (Read: eye baggy and still a overall tired look).
I used to be surprised with the jokes and comments that are made on the floor.This is how we cope because this is what it’s like.
