Good news! As of July I am officially a fourth year medical student. Mostly this means I feel like slightly less of a dipshit. I learned a great lesson over third year, which I think is best expressed by Douglas Adams:
“There is a theory which states that if anybody ever discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.”
That also happens to be a great description of how medical school works. Now that I’m in my fourth and final year, I’m finally on to it. These days, I expect to be a moron.
I decided to kick off my fourth year with the sickest of the still-living in the medical intensive care unit. The unit happens to be on the 6th floor of the hospital. On my first day I walked over to the row of charts and immediately noted that most of them were numbered starting 666. Heh.
I pulled a random chart and started reading. A little panic swept over me as I mentally ticked off the problems. The guy in 4 (666-4, that is) had been in the hospital for two months already, on a slow, and painful decline. He had AIDS, CMV colitis, MRSA meningitis, etc, etc. Staph-scalded-skin-syndrome for chrissake. The only unafflicted organs were his eyes, which tracked me around the room as I attempted to sort out his lines. “Hey…I don’t know if you can understand me...my name is Simone.” We’d put tubes in his body wherever we could find a spot. He couldn’t speak for himself, but his wife decided he’d be a Full Code. Apparently she was living with her boyfriend hours away from here, and had not come to see him. I don’t think she fully grasped the situation, but the law is the law. After a couple of days pumping drugs and fluids in him, his eyes stopped following me. The wife finally decided to withdraw care, but could we keep him alive until she came for a visit? We tried, but when I came in the next morning his room was empty. I asked if the wife had come. She never made it.
It’s been over two weeks now, and my panic has subsided. It’s been replaced with a feeling I don’t have words to describe. Maybe it’s just numb? Yesterday I coolly helped rid the unit of a body. First the nurses and I zipped it into a white body bag. Then we launched it onto a a large metal cart, one-two-THREE! Over the body went a rectangular box made out of white canvas. The whole ensemble resembled a large buffet, like what you might see at a wedding. As he got wheeled out of the room I wondered how many people would think that crab cakes were under there.
After that I sat down next to my intern, who happens to be mega cool. “Man, this kind of blows.” I announced.
“Yeah…how many people have died since we got here?” He began counting off on his fingers… “Let’s see…the guy in 4, the guy in 8..oh another went to comfort care. Oh, and the nines.”
So far, everyone that had gone into room 9 has died. But not before they spent a couple of days breathing on The Oscillator, which is basically a last-resort ventilator. It makes a machiney-death-rattle so loud you can hear it across the floor. It makes the patient shudder with each mechanical mini-breath. It makes me shudder when I hear it, but I can’t block it out.
Not that there aren’t any bright spots in the rotation. First of all, my friend Andy is working the ICU with me. Andy’s cool. He’s confident. He knows shit, a lot more shit than I do, which is actually kind of annoying to my puny ego. We have fun torturing the third year medical students (until they figure out that we actually have no power over them). It’s mean, but we have lots of pent-up rage from when we were picked on as third years.
This is a side note, but it just so happens that my ‘extra-small’ scrubs are humongous on me. I don’t get it, because yes I am kind of small but I’m not that small. Still, there is enough fabric in the ass of my scrub pants to fit a couple of basketballs under my butt. If I really really wanted to, I could pull the top of my pants up over my boobs and tie them close to my neck. That way I wouldn’t have to wear a shirt. Anyway, the enormity of my pants didn't escape Andy. “Hey MC Hammer!” There was no way I could argue with him. So I did the Hammer-dance. If I remember it correctly, it means pointing your toes outward and quickly scampering side to side, making your pants billow in the wind like sails. I have no idea what I look like while I do this, but the appalled look on Andy’s face probably meant I succeeded. I was just about to collapse into a fit of giggles when it hit me: Whoa! I’m in ICU! Suddenly I had to stop. It was as if I’d just Hammertimed right into the Grim Reaper’s icy breath. My giggles froze in my throat and I stood at solemn attention for the rest of rounds.
“Hi, I’m Simone!”
She glared at me. “I haaaaaate it heeeeere!”
Not that I blame her. Over the next hour or so she complained about the bed, the nurses, the ceiling, the air, her mom. But I just smiled. The bitchstorm was like Bach in my ears, a glorious sign of life. To celebrate I did a little victory booty-dance behind the nurses’ station. Take that, Grim Reaper …Well, for now anyway.
