Life in Triage

Family Medicine: Day 1

Day full of dull lectures, ended by one physician who basically gave us a 1 hour lecture on why we should go into family med. He sounded like a really bad local car commercial. Listen, don’t try to convince me your specialty is interesting when I’m about to spend a month on it. I’ll decide for myself. Save your bad marketing.

A schizophrenic man believes he is pregnant with triplets. He persists in talking about his “woman hole.” The attending intimates to me that I should probably do a pelvic examination and a DRE (Digital Rectal Exam) to be sure everything is normal. Luckily, he forgets before its time for me to actually do this.

In talking to patients, my overwhelming conviction is that I need to call my parents and thank them for my relatively normal childhood.

Life can be so incredibly metaphorical, if you let it. We had a patient who was picked up walking…as she had been for 11 days or so. Just walking, picked up on the side of the road by the police because she appeared drunk. Unkempt and filthy after 11 days, she certainly appeared….something. By that point, she was just walking, having forgotten her original purpose, but walking was what she did, so she kept doing it.

“I knew I was looking for something, but I can’t remember what it was. I don’t think I really wanted to find it though, ’cause I had been looking for so long, I didn’t want to find it and be disappointed” she said to me. I sat there, face smiling and taking her in, but internally I was shocked by the clarity of what she had said. This phrase was situated between all sorts of nonsense, but taken by itself, it possesses a profound truth.

We spend so much time in our lives looking for something…and many times we look for so long that we almost completely forget what our search started out seeking. Its a remarkable difficult question, in the abstract to answer. But we keep walking, because walking is what we do. We trudge about our lives, without any definable goal, just drifting. We’re almost scared to find whatever it is we were looking for, because there remains the definite possibility that it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be in the first place, then what the hell is all of this for? We almost prefer our endless search, because at least there is a goal. At least there is still something out there that might be worth living for, that might be worth all this suffering. As long as it remains elusive and indefinable, it can still be something worth pursuing, and our lives still have some, albeit vague, meaning.

If we find it and it doesn’t satisfy (as so much in this live doesn’t), where do we have to go?

All this from a crazy lady walking. Crazy.

To the people who say I need to update more, I agree. Psychiatry, however, has left me with a distinct lack of inspiration for posting. I find it dull. Expect much more soon though, I’ve been building up some stories.