Beginning to Learn from Patients

For the past couple months, I've spent thursday afternoons with 3 of my classmates to practice our interviewing skills in elderly homes and hospitals. It strikes me as absolutely amazing that we are allowed to walk into a room and ask a 66 year old woman, who is suffering from her third bout of cancer - who hasn't talked to her family about it and is awaiting a procedure - anything we want. Including why she hasn't told her family, if she is sexually active, the history of the diagnosis, is she worried or afraid?... Why are we granted that?
We are part of the club, we wear our white coat, and in a few years we will have patients of our own who rely on us... As strangers we hear a patient's deepest fears, hopes, desires, worries, we hear things that they keep from most of the world. Then, after walking into that room and sitting down to talk to the patient, we walk out, thank them for their time, and never talk to or see them again. We don't know what will happen to them, and we don't think much about it after leaving the hospital and riding the T back to wherever we are going. Sometimes it feels like we are more concerned with our "patient presentation" that we deliver to the group and resident supervising us. We stress out about our performance, making sure we include all the necessary details - the reason why they are in the hospital, their medical, surgical, familial, and social history. It's truly selfish, that the time we spend with the patient is so very much unbalanced, serving our education, while we have so little to offer. We are granted a luxury unlike anything I've ever experienced in my life.

However, through these experiences we have an amazing learning opportunity: To hear a patient's story. We may never see them again, but we will remember how they felt being on dialysis three times a week, and appreciation of a family member sitting through each 4 hour session they spent plugged into a machine to filter their blood the way their kidneys no longer can. We hear about their life, what matters to them outside the white walls of the hospital, and in these stories sometimes we get a glimpse of some of the issues we are all afraid to bring up... will they ever live a normal life again? Will they live to see this next new year? How are they coping?

I write this sitting on a plane headed to SF for the weekend, to see a few of my closest friends, to get away from the same med school crowd and to change up the pace. The constant studying, lecture, library, apartment, occasionally clinic or hospital, exercise/soccer when I have time, rarely cooking for myself... it's healthy to break that routine. On top of that, YOLO - you only live once. If it matters to you, find a way to make it happen.