I'm No Dummy

 

They call me Bill

For the past three weeks I’ve been in and out of hospitals conferring with doctors about shortness of breath, getting EKGs run and discussing high blood pressure and gout.

I’m so glad it’s just make-believe, although I’ve had 15 EKGs the past two weeks so I know my heart is in good shape.

The job of being a standardized patient is one I’ve been enjoying immensely. I like the thought that I’m helping these young men and women as they move along their important path to becoming doctors. Especially now that the traditional four-year curriculum is offered as a three-year stint. The deer-in-the-headlights look I’ve seen from some of the first-years is understandable with all that is being thrown at them and what they are expected to retain.

Getting that next generation of medical professionals is critical now that with a shortage of nurses they’ve been hiring artists to draw blood. Hearing them discuss P Waves and T Waves reminds me of what I took away from my high school science classes. Where do you find nucleotides? At the nucleobeach.

We go off a script and there isn’t a lot of room for improvisation, so the hardest part for me has been keeping the “humorous” comments I would use on my own doctors to myself. Unless they open the door of course. When asked (in a scenario) how often I use my erectile dysfunction medication I replied, “That depends on the missus.” I think that earned a sympathy chuckle.

Normal questions like, “Is your heart racing?” brings to mind the days growing up calling strangers to see if their refrigerator was running. And it’s a touch hard to refrain when the students tell you that they want to get an echo.   

The computer screen view of the room

This past week I’ve had the opportunity to play the great and powerful Oz. A team of students enter to assess the mannequin in the bed while their proctor manipulates vitals such as blood pressure, oxygen levels and rate and rhythm. That leaves me behind the two-way glass as the dummy’s voice. I wanted to use different accents or work on impressions, but I quickly scrapped that idea as it’s hard enough to be out of breath every few words. It is so much better to be a neutral observer as the students work through their progressions than being in the bed.

Some distinct observations (with apologies) I’ve made the past week. Beta blockers sounds like football players defending fraternities and pitting edema makes me think of taking soybeans out of the pod.

My unique medical history reared its head this week as well when acting as guinea pig for students working the ultrasound machine. The first group in---two first-year residents and a second-year student---decided to work the cardiac side of things first. So they put the probe where they thought the heart would be and started moving it around. A minute or so in, the resident started pressing down and warned, “Sir I can’t find your heart!”

To me that was a bit amusing. It was not so comical to my parents when I was born with my heart to the right of where it was supposed to be. It was cause for some tense times until they were assured I’d be fine after a visit to Johns Hopkins. Again it wasn’t so funny when the doctor in Munich doing my Navy physical freaked out a little bit and was about to disqualify me until my folks were able to produce documentation about the condition.  

When I told the resident my heart was a little to the right she was able to finally find it. That led to some more issues as she wasn’t sure how to read the ultrasound since everything was opposite, prompting a call to one of the senior doctors, making it a definite teachable moment.

In the coming weeks I’m slated to get a physical exam, so hopefully they won’t find anything I don’t already know about.