Week 3: You're going to stick that WHERE?

Week 3 was probably best titled as it is as it summed up my experience in the hospital. As our last part of orientation this week we were given the opportunity to gain better insight as to how a patient might feel in various aspects of life. In our largest simulated portion we spent a night over at the hospital in our separate teams, and also in isolation within the hospital. Our team was assigned to Tuesday 7:00 PM - Wednesday 10:00 AM and the itinerary went about as follows:

• 7:01 PM - Admitted to hospital
• 7:20 PM - Meet nurse Brigitta
• 7:21 PM - Get vitals taken
• 7:23 PM - Started filling stack of hospital forms
• 8:00 PM - Finished filling forms
• 8:10 PM - Gowned, this time as a patient
• 8:30 PM - Rescued from being stuck in the bathroom
• 8:35 PM - Get vitals taken
• 8:40 PM - Get height and weight taken by Gary
• 9:00 PM - Resident patient consult
• 9:10 PM - Resident answers first page
• 9:15 PM - Resident returns
• 9:20 PM - Resident answers second page
• 9:25 PM - Resident returns
• 9:30 PM - Resident leaves
• 9:45 PM - Catheter Team enters and briefs about Foley
• 9:45:01 PM - Dread sets in
• 10:00 PM - Procedure is 'done'
• 10:00:01 PM - Moment I realize that I've been had
• 10:00:02 PM - Much laughter at the nurse's station
• 10:05 PM - Gary take a second height and weight
• 10:30 PM - IV 'inserted'
• 10:35 PM - NG tube 'inserted'
• 11:00 PM - General services arrive to wheel me to imaging
• 11:15 PM - Arrive for abdominal CT's
• 11:23 PM - CT's 'taken' of abdomen
• 11:45 PM - Return to room
• 12:00 AM - Get vitals taken
• 12:45 AM - Get pulse oximeter attached
• 1:00 AM - Alarms go off all around the floor
• 1:15 AM - I innovate earplugs out of Kleenex and water
• 2:00 AM - Alarms stop sounding
• 2:15 AM - Brigitta comes in and takes me on a walk around the hospital
• 2:20 AM - Tech tells me my butt's hanging out while I'm on the elevator
• 2:45 AM - Get back to room
• 3:00 AM - Get vitals taken
• 3:10 AM - Finally get some sleep
• 5:00 AM - Get vitals taken
• 5:30 AM - Provided hot towel and water to sponge bathe
• 5:45 AM - Get vitals taken
• 6:00 AM - Try to sleep some more
• 8:00 AM - Fill out more forms
• 9:00 AM - Grand rounds, team comes in and resident presents my case
• 10:00 AM - Magically cured and debriefed

So to sum up some of the observations that we all had as we debriefed: we definitely had some fear, loneliness, anxiety, uncertainty and sleeplessness, but we also gained a greater appreciation for what it must be like to be a patient in the hospital, and hopefully some better understanding as to how to treat patients in the hospital having felt some treatment and some mistreatment(intentional) by the staff.

This student as the patient exercise, definitely left us with a lot more stories to tell, and if I had some more time I would tell them more in depth which I hope in the future to do, but in addition to this we also had some more simulations this week including the aging game.

Think: gloved for arthritis, legs strapped together for Parkinson's, wearing greasy goggles for glaucoma, and using a walker with the assigned tasks for us to:

1. Figure out a drug schedule for our 10 varying medications
2. Go to the "post office"
3. Go "grocery shopping"
4. Go to "the restaurant"
5. Return to the "nursing home"

And you get an interesting afternoon trying to understand how it must be to be old. It was an interesting perspective as we came up with no less than 8 times to take our medication without 24 hours, found that all the normal everyday functions that we are accustomed to were impaired, and worse off that we were subject to age discrimination and also mistreatment in a variety of ways.

This exercise left me with a question though, will we age into the same simulation one day or will our experience as a techno-savvy generation be entirely different? One of the factors that geriatric patients suffer from is loneliness and isolation - the fact that you are reading this blog attests to a paradox to the aging game where even lonely blogging becomes a asynchronous social event that can bridge some of the effects of people aging now. It'll be interesting to see what future elderly care will entail.

Finally if that were not enough, we also we certified for Basic Life Support this week as we underwent a 4-hour course of CPR, choking, rescue breathing, and using AEDs for a variety of situations. Now we can carry our little cards and use the little AED (Automated External Defibrillators) machines that you see around public places and in planes and such.

So that, in terms of my student mentor Josh, "wraps up Mayo Camp," and the didactics have kicked in hard... actually very hard attributing for the delayed publication of this entry. Histology & Cell Biology, Genetics & Genomics constitute Block 2, and so it begins...