Temple University School of Medicine - Skull Yearbook (Philadelphia, PA)

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INPATIENT CARE

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MEDICAL CLINIC Doc. when I lift my left arm I get this shooting pain in my right leg and every night after 6 my neck hurts.” It’s going around. you say smugly and then, with typical senior student elan, you prescribe Librium. Medical Clinic went 'round and 'round, a succession of bored people, hungry people, tired people, friendly people. We'll remember the old man who shambled along with canes but later was seen running to the tap room—the teenagers who were forced to forego teenage life—the old people broken by illness and poverty. Then, there was the famous breast exam: Have you felt any masses yourself? “No. but it sure feels different when my husband does that!” We grew more familiar with the grey area between psychosomatic and organic disease. We say how unhappy and unhealthy environment can infect all ages. How in God's name will we ever develop the patience to deal with all those hurt and hating people?

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IN-PATIENT CARE The middle of the night, the telephone rings, we answer; blood pressure dropping, urine output dropping, diabetic patient acting strangely. All of a sudden it hits you—“hey. it's up to me. I'm responsible! For the first time, “on call’’ in the evening, we made our rounds, giving perivenous Keflin. subcutaneous Heparin, spreading cheer. We learned the seventeen causes of systolic hypertension for Rounds; those who didn’t know learned to stand unobtrusively in the background. For some of us. this was our first struggle with the terminal patient: fighting the vicious cycles of deranged physiology, trying to counter each new turn of events. If we lost, we and the patient’s family knew we had tried. A less spectacular satisfaction was to get the alcoholic back on his feet, or to get back a non-malignant tissue diagnosis, to stabilize a diabetic, or to start a diseased heart on the road to recovery. We tried to surmount the basic stumbling-blocks to good Medicine; difficult communication, treating symptoms, confusion with psychosomatic disease, mis-reading real symptoms and discouragement. Because the Resident twisted arms, we Seniors filled out the Welfare forms, the discharge summaries. hunted up lab results. Because we had to. we hiked up to the Pavilion to give the Heparins. did the “Pinks and Blues. But our satisfactions outweighed the little jobs. We were given responsibility.