This is where all the magic happens. And by magic, I of course don’t mean magic but rather monochromatic, walls of text, scrolling across the screen, with offering up more and more information i cant seem to comprehend. Its not all bad- sometimes we get pictures to break up the walls of text. Pictures so grotesque, so unnerving, you wish the author didn’t even bother enough to include an example, but rather stuck to his volumes of monotony, and kept your sorry soul out of visualizations.
Textbooks are one thing, but clinical rounds, are a whole other ball game.
Those ghastly images now have texture, feel, and intrinsic material value. The texts have come alive, and now they have 2 legs, 2 arms, and 2 million questions, that you are somehow supposed to have the answer, and even more worryingly, the solution to.
Worse than that still, is the knowledge, that no matter what you do for the man, how well you treat him, the jubilance of sending him home, the very next day, there will be, with an almost certainty, 2 more men, with even worse prognoses and even worse clincial presentations. Thus we find ourselves facing, non other than the hospital hydra. Cut one head off, and two grows in its place.
How then, does one deal with this conundrum? This onslaught of death and despair, of dismay and distress?
One can reside himself to not letting the state of the pateint affect his personal life, by keeping a work life balance, of work being done at work, and life being done at every other part of the day.
How is this possible? How is this possible, when the very nature of man, is tested for 8 hours a day on ward rounds? man feels sad, when one dies. man feels upset when one is injured. man feels uncomfortable invading the privacy of another. Man must break everyone of these ingrained abilities, daily, to get the job at hand done. Is this not, a constant destruction of the inner self? a contant attack, an assult on ones being? by standing outside those castle walls, and chipping away at the fotress, eventually, given enough time, the defences will be worn down.
Deceased, desolate, desensitized. All difficult to deal with. For the the patient, or the physician? To suffer, or to see one suffer, is one of the hardest tests a man