Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Call me Mrs. Shepard Day 3

Today was a half day....Neurology-wise.

Since it was only a half day in the hospital, we only had time to examine one patient to allow enough time to discuss the findings.

We had a nice young Neurologist show us one patient before we went to our own.

Neurology, as mentioned before, has never been my favorite specialty. German medical college requires you to complete a 3 month internship within the first 2 years of med school as a "nurse's assistant" lets call it. We work the same shifts as the nurses and get to do all the dirty work: clean, wash patients, answer bells, run around like a chicken with its head cut off. I did half of this time on the Neurology ward.

Every morning I had about 5 patients to completely wash and get ready for the day. A lot of the patients couldn't even move so we were constantly rotating between rooms and moving them around. It was really, really hard work. The second half I did in OBGYN was heaven compared to that.

A lot of the patients are difficult to talk to because they straight up can't or don't understand what you are trying to tell them. It is frustrating.

Then there is the point of them not operating.

Anyways, the first patient the doctor showed us had a stroke and was not able to understand what we were saying or asking her to do. She would either just look at us with blank eyes, do something completely different than that what we asked or keep saying she doesn't understand.

We didn't get a lot of examinations done on her.

My friend and I had our patient assigned and we went to go see her. Our patient's situation isn't completely diagnosed yet. We took her history and followed that with a complete neurological examination. We didn't find a lot of things that were pathological. Our best guess was that she might have a peripheral polyneuropathy. The doctors are still running all kinds of tests though.

After all the groups had seen their patients, the doctor took us to see one more patient. The patient most likely has Creutzfeldt-Jakobs disease. It was impressive to see. The neurologist told us that the hospital was a sort of center for prion diseases so she has seen quite a few cases but most neurologists go their whole career without seeing a patient like this one.

After that visit, we looked at some CTs and MRIs and then went to a conference room to discuss our patients. I had baked cookies last night so I brought some for the others.

We spent a good 1.5 hours discussing our cases and were then done for the day.

I continued my day teaching english, attending a work meeting for my night shifts and then running errands in town.

Little life lesson, don't leave your bank card in the machine too long without operating the computer (by, for instance, looking for the right amount of money you want to deposit) because if you wait just long enough, the machine will eat your card. Fml. I got mad for about 3 minutes and then decided to let it go, have to deal with it tomorrow (although it doesn't fit my schedule what so ever) and move on since I couldn't do anything about it anymore. I met up with a good friend of mine for a quick Christmas market visit (opened today, yay!).

The next few days will be a little crazy. I have night shift tomorrow, Friday and Sunday and leave for a hospital Monday morning 1.5 hours after my night shift ends......oh my.

Thus, I won't be up long today. (hopefully)

Baci

V

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