Oopsie
Do you ever worry that you've done something really bad, without meaning to? Caused some awful thing, but purely by accident? I'm getting a lot of that recently.
I'm a medical student. I'm working on the pediatric inpatient floor at an urban hospital right now. I've been there two and a half weeks. I see all kinds of interesting stuff: cellulitis, staph scalded skin syndrome, little babies with fevers, pneumonia.
Not surprisingly, I'm also sick. I woke up yesterday having trouble breathing. I started off with a bit of a cough. By this morning, I was coughing up icky nastiness... at the hospital. On call. Seeing kiddos. One of the patients admitted today was a little boy with a history of kidney problems. He was having stomach pain, and when you pushed on his belly, it was firm and knobby, and he groaned. The x-ray showed that he was all full of poop, all the way up his left colon, across, and down his right colon... you're not supposed to have solid poo that far into your gut. So we ordered him some enemas and some laxatives, and waited to see what happened.
What happened was that he had to pee, and it hurt. A lot. He was peeing pus. Do you even have to send that down for a culture? It's clearly infected, and surely all the way up to his kidneys. So we ordered him some antibiotics and something to make his bladder hurt less, and waited to see what happened.
What happened next was that he started coughing, and his cough got all junky and gross. He's also an asthmatic, so he started wheezing, and we gave him a breathing treatment, and waited to see what happened.
I don't know what happened next, because that's about when I got sent home because I lost my voice. Was this my fault? Did I make him sick? He was already sick, of course, or he wouldn't be in the hospital. But we weren't expecting any respiratory problems in a kid with a UTI. I went in and examined him that morning, and checked in on him repeatedly through the day. Was a little bit of exposure too much for a kid who already had a raging infection?
But, then again, everyone who works there comes in a little bit sick. It's not like calling in sick to other jobs. It's not like asking Jose to flip the burgers for you. Your patients are counting on you. You need to be there for them. Who will take care of them if you don't? Mostly, you fill yourself full of cold medicine, and hope for the best. Take a sip of water before you go to a patient's room, and try not to cough. Mostly, it works. I don't think I coughed in any patient rooms today, and I washed my hands constantly. But maybe I didn't wash them enough, or maybe I should have been wearing a mask, even though I wasn't coughing in the rooms. I feel terrible, even though I never meant any harm, even though it may not even be my fault. I probably picked up my illness in the hospital, from one of the other kids, but we're not supposed to spread it around. It's not nice to share things like that.
We're supposed to be taking care of people. How often do we cause them harm instead? Will this continue to happen? And if it does, will I ever get used to it?
"first do no harm"?
is the kid ok now? my familly is currently sueing some place called urgent care for not giving my brother a preventative for pneuomnia when he came in, leading in turn to his coma, collapsed lung, stroke, etc. i feel weird about it.
Yeah, he's okay, at least from that perspective. Turns out it's really unlikely the two were related, but I spent a sleepless night worrying about it.
I'm sorry to hear about your brother. The issue is that they didn't give him prophylaxis, knowing he was going to be exposed there? Sounds like a miserable situation for all involved. Seems like maybe they missed the pneumonia, too... that's a lot of complications otherwise. I hope he's okay now.