Winter memories

For some reason, every time I'm in church, I think about when I worked at the hospital. One thing I remembered last Sunday was spending the night at the hospital several times during two bad blizzards that struck the city in 2006. I remember the new wing of the hospital that would house the pediatric and ob/gyn patients opening. That was nice because those floors were vacated for when nearly all the staff had to stay over.

The times I stayed over, I started to realize how much the hospital was becoming my home. The people were like my family because I would share my life with my co-workers and I got to patients that had been there a while and the patients that would come in and out of our dialysis unit. Furthermore, home was a place of stress with my mom out of a job and all my free moments went to helping her and cooking and doing anything that she didn't do because of the time she spent searching for work. What comfort I couldn't get at home, I got from people at the hospital.

At the same time, I was starting to see more cases that were hard to handle emotionally. The same place of refuge was also a place of pain. I remember my secondaries for med school being due at this time. Sometimes, walking down the halls and seeing the med school students, I would want so badly to be one, and fear I wouldn't make it. However, at the same time, med school seemed so distant to the day to day crises I was going through. That ranks up there with the 2nd hardest winter I think I have been through. But I realize that I learned so much and I am so grateful that God got me through.

For my patients

as a preface, I haven't written in this blog for a while because something called grad school is taking over my life.

Anyway, in one of my classes, we are all collaborating with our professor to write this article about how health and education policy should address drug use in a more comprehensive way. Today I researched how drug use is related to health outcomes. That's when they, one by one, walked through my head, though some pausing to soak themselves even more into my memory.

These are patients at the hospital, some whom I've seen over and over. Some got well, others got worse, and a few passed away. I only know for sure that a handful had illnesses stemming directly from drugs. One was on dialysis and truly started wasting away in uncontrollable pain my last few weeks at the hospital. Quite a number were going through alcohol withdrawl and I saw them either unable to stand well or have to be in restraints lest they pull their IV or heart monitor leads off.

I'm helping write this article for them. Wherever they are. Whether they are home, in recovery, or con Dios it is for them. Tears came to my eyes as I realized with every word I type for this paper, everything I research, it is for them. No matter if it gets published or not, our intention was there. It is our small way of changing things, and in a way, it is my small tribute to these patients whom I had grown to know.

Healing by Telling

So, the Medscape student that I wrote about in a blog a few weeks ago entitled Comforting a Doctor(in Training) wrote back a few days ago, and with my crazy graduate student schedule, I had a moment to drop her a line. She basically said that my email helped and she explained a little bit about the clinical training she was in. She told me that she knew that the patient whom she lost had a terminal disease, but she still was really emotional about it. Using examples from my life in the hospital, I told her about learning that sometimes it's hard to let go of a patient even though you know you must becauase you're leaving the clinical environment, or because the patient disease is quite advanced.

Telling these stories heals me in a way, because I think about the situations differently post-clinically, and I know that God truly is using them for His good and to help this other person. It's really neat to see this two-way working of healing the hurts that come with being in the field of medicine.

Ha ha this doesn't scare me!

I, a masters student in Human Development and Family Studies now knows where the dissection lab is for gross anatomy. Sound wierd, and it is. The instructor I'm a GTA for moved her classroom so I went and posted signs for the undergrads so they'd be able to find the class. It is in the biology building which is pretty large and rather complicated. Upon my wanderings on the floor where the classroom was, I saw a room that was quite obviously a dissection lab. I tried not to show my surprise. The highly amusing thing was that everyone was walking around is scrubs so it reminded me of my dear hospital in Denver. I got some signage up and borrowed some masking tape from the nice lab peoples.

I figured I'd put a sign up near the elevator so the poor undergrads don't freak out if they go the wrong way and wander into a lab that screams MAJOR BIO PREMED NERDS AT WORK! It's funny that being around all that dissection stuff doesn't creep me out. Partially it doesn't because I think about all my friends that took the class, but partially because - I'm premed, and I was around stuff like that at the hospital, so it's really no big deal.

It's just funny how life in the hospital has helped me and how it has allowed me to help others in the most random moments.

Comforting a doctor(in-training)

I still suscribe to Medscape even though I might choose not be premed anymore, but it still has too much useful stuff on it unsuscribe. Anyway, a few medical students have blogs where they write about their experiences for other medical students to read. One medical student wrote about breaking bad news to family members and how she thought she might deal with it, her fears surrounding it, and what she learned from her preceptor's example.

One student replied by sharing her first patient death experience and she felt rather overwhelmed by it. I knew exactly how she was feeling from my expriences at the hospital, so I felt compelled to write her back. Here's the text of that email (edited)

Hi [MMM] this is KT from Mescape Medical
students. I was very touched by your blog reply to the
"Delivering Bad News" blog. Here it is in case you
don't remember what you wrote:

"[MMM mentions that she had to deal with a patient death] i was crying and crying and still crying, [she has dealt with patient deaths before] , but actually i do not know what happend to me, i am still thinking if that happend to me and [she expresses if she is this distraught, how will the pt. family handle it?] i still asking searching for an answer. [She would like to learn how to control her emotions so she can gently tell a family that a patient has passed]." [her response edited for clarity, I think she is an international medical student]

Before entry into my masters program I worked in
Patient Transport and we are familiar with patients we
transport multiple times. The first time a patient I
knew rather well passed away, my reaction was the same
as yours. I went home after work and cried. Were you
crying when you gave the news or what? My friends have
seen doctors crying when they give the news, though
they were just teared up, not sobbing. I've cried a
few times, though not in front of patients.

I know you are in the middle of your training, but a
question I would ask you is are you ready to handle
these kind of emotions for your whole career? I know
you'll have friends and your preceptors and professors
to help you through - I just don't know if you have
ever thought about it during your premed years.
However, I honestly don't think premeds or medical
students truly understand the gravity of these
emotions until we enter a clinical setting.

What I find helps is realizing that God, the Great
Physician somehow holds all our patients in His hands
and He can comfort them, their families, and the
medical community that cares for them. I hope this
email helps you.

KT


So, yeah, that's my email. It just struck me that even with only my 1 year of working in Patient Transport, here I am ministring to a third year medical student - somewhere. It gave me goosebumps when I realized that. However, it's a good feeling. I do pray for MMM and hope she doesn't regret her decision to become a doctor and that she finds comfort from her friends, more exprienced doctors, and of course the Great Physician.

From the wards to the lecture halls

I return once more to CSU. From wandering the halls where antiseptic and other smells waft from different rooms to halls where people sit and wait for classes to begin. Going from helping a patient who is in a lot of pain move to helping a study buddy who is stressed out. Campus and the hospital seem like they are a world apart.

Working in the hospital has changed me in ways I think I might just be figuring out. Like today at church during worship, I reflected on the songs "Joyous Light" and "Indescribable" by Chris Tomlin. I had always liked the song Indescribable in undergraduate but now when I pondered the song, I pondered God's creation in the human body, but images of the human body sick and broken came to my mind. Tears flowed down my face because I knew now the pain of watching another human suffer illness and injury, but yet through that, I could see God's hand still. This same song that had me jumping around joyously because pictures of perfect molocules from my textbooks ran through my brain now had me in tears because I had seen the other side of my premed classes: the pain and suffering in the patients I saw. That aspect change me, yet my praise of God never changed. However, I feel apart from the world I knew because of so much happening. WIth work and with helping a family member who had lost her job.

That crisis plus work was my life for a good 10 months with me clinging to God through it all. I left my undergraduate year happy to be graduating, progressing in my walk with God and recovering from two recent losses. The year off the family crisis and being immersed in a clinical setting changed me and maybe even scarred me again. So, who am I now? Who is this graduate student here in the Library where I had sat as an undergraduate? I still access that joy I had my first 4 years of being Christian, but now I also understand what it means to cry out to God when I am in pain or when I see the pain of others and it makes me hurt inside too. God shaped me somehow through all this. Now with this new shape, I must somehow fit into the world of campus I had once walked before.

"He healeth the broken hearted and bindeth up their wounds

Psalm 147:3 – known as the Great Physician verse

Today was my last day in Transport at my hospital. Most of my friends were there. My co-workers on Monday had a pot-luck in my honor which was really really nice of them. Today I gave them the cards I did for them and my extra scrubs.

I thought I would cry or almost start crying throughout the day, but I was able to hold it until I got home. I left the hospital happy I was able to serve so many people there and that I learned so much.

The tears came when I got home. I thought about how I'd miss the co-workers that had become like family and all the nurses, doctors, and other techs that had taught me so much. Images of patients that had a special place in my heart came to my mind. I cried tears of joy for the ones that had healed or were getting better and tears of sorrow for those about ready to pass away or who had already passed. I cried for those visitors I saw who were worried about their family member in the hospital, but some of those were tears of gratitude that I was able to comfort them with words of assurance and to let them know that from personal experience, I knew the same fears they did. Yet, a lot of my tears were tears of gratitude that God gave me that job and that I saw His hand through all of it. That's why I chose to use the Great Physician verse in the title. This verse reflects the pain and suffering I saw at the hospital, but how the Lord covers it with His hand.

Transport was a harder job than I bargained for. The deaths of my grandpa and my uncle influenced my reaction to the sorrows in the hospital, but I honestly wasn't prepared for how much a clinical environment could impact my heart. However, the rewards of seeing patients improve and go home was what kept me coming back even when it was really hard. Knowing I'd see my family away from my family made coming back day after day worth it as well.

I leave the world of the hospital to go back to the classroom. How will that world impact what I do at school? How will it affect my career choices once I get done with these next two years of school? I need to think about if I can handle that emotionally intense clinical environment or not. Intellectually, working in that environment would be a good challenge, but stripping away the intellectual musings about a patient, would I be left to deal with the pain and suffering that I would see? Right now, I can honestly say that I'm not ready to make that my career now. Will that change once I put two years behind this year and heal more completely from my grandpa and uncle's deaths? Only time will tell and only God really knows.

One thing I know is that I will be able to understand what others going into the medical field experience when they first transition from the classroom to a clinical environment. If I don't become a doctor for a while, I know I'll be able to help others making that transition because I have been through it myself. I'll understand the true joys that come from that place as well as the tears and I'll truly be able to say, "I understand." God has a plan to use that to minister to others however He chooses.