As Far As I Know, Those Are The Only Diseases You Can Have

For the first time since I have been in medical training, I got sick. Not just the kind of sick where its a cold, or you know that its stress, but the kind of sick that does not go away and randomly comes up just to piss you off when you just want to have fun (like Cyndi Lauper says that a typical girl does). This sickness manifested itself in two ways: one, a seemingly harmless allergy-like illness that would come on strong and cause me to have asthma attacks after feeling perfectly fine the day before, and the other, a "stomach bug" in which I felt fine and would wake up the next day puking for the whole day straight (sounds like fun I KNOW). Being sick, however annoying, made me realize just how different it is to be a sick..."doctor in training".

When my pesky little allergy-like disease chose not to go away after over a month, I finally made an appointment at student health. The minute the doctor came in to see me, instead of asking what brought me in, or what I was suffering from, his first question to me was "HOW, as a MEDICAL STUDENT, could  I POSSIBLY wait for 4 weeks before seeing a doctor?!?!". I paused for a second, wondering to myself if it was appropriate to say that I still had no faith in his ability to fix what I had, and merely thought it would "go away" as illnesses most often do. I wondered if this then meant that I had no faith in medicine to fix most everyday problems and if I, like health care policy experts often complain about typical American health care consumer doing, use our medical system for sickness, and always in the extreme. Oh well...too late to fix this problem. Then, as if to pre-empt every question he was going to ask me, I did exactly what I hate my patients doing in clinical, I answered all the possible questions he could ask me before he even had a chance to speak. One by one I knocked off questions on my list in my head, rattling off my symptoms, my past medical history, my current medications, and even my drug allergies. It was as if I was interviewing myself. I did not even pause to wonder what this doctor (or probably PA) could possibly want to ask me that I did not learn to ask myself in my all encompassing medical interview. It appears that doctor's appointments will never be the same again....

Besides changing my doctor experience, when it came to my second illness, the infamous stomach flu, I received a lot more doctoring than I had intended. Upon beginning conversations about "how I was feeling" or "if I was feeling better" with my friends, they flipped the switch and were suddenly transformed into doctors interviewing a patient (a trait they could not shut off even though most realized they were doing it). I was asked about my complete history of present illness, including questions about my diet, how often I throw up, and the occasionally uncomfortable questions about what it looks like and how much pain I was in. Let's just say it took the shared information between friends up a notch or two. One friend, while encouraging me to go see a doctor (which I again put off, as I could not possibly see what a doctor could fix for a complaint of "occasionally throwing up three weeks apart"), even asked if it was possible for me to have C. Diff (a crazy infection that is severe and common in a hospital...Google it) because I had taken antibiotics for my sinus infection (conclusion from doctors appointment mentioned above) and that had cleared out my immunity to other things. That kind of drastic leap, and crazy, nonsensical diagnosis, even of yourself, comes from learning medicine... but not KNOWING medicine. In fact, one friend of mine took a quiz online and convinced herself she had Aspergers. Another realized that her broken clavicle had reattached to the wrong bone when it healed. And, all of this diagnosing is before we even do pathology or really learn anything about disease....I can't even wait for THAT shit storm to begin.

A word to the wise, do not ask a medical student for medical advice. At the moment our growing knowledge base is just a danger to our friends, our "patients", and ourselves.  To further illustrate this point in probably the most hilarious way possible, just watch this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8l8_G_ce_Q