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Tales from a Student of Neurology

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Lucky Laser

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There is Lena again. Sitting in I-465 traffic on her way to her first day in her Neurology clerkship. She should have known better than to leave only one hour in advance. Typically, from the southwest side of town one must leave an entire day early to get to their destination on time. Especially if they are too lazy to move out of the feeder lane.

Lena wished mournfully that she could have a nap despite the fact that she'd just had one wonderful hour of sleep in her comfy futon. She wished this all the way to school, where she parked and walked quickly to the clerkship orientation room, managing to be only a few minutes late.

After gathering the assigned books and handouts, Lena seated herself in a desk in the back of the room. She chuckled slightly when at the end of lecture, the guy two seats down tried to use the desk in between them (which had her books on it) as leverage to get up. It started to tip and could have hurtled him over its side. Busting one's head on a neurology text is slightly ironic, you know.

Lena was ready for action after the inner laughter had subsided but had no idea what to do next other than page the poor resident she was assigned to. She bumbled her papers back into her folder and as luck would have it, another student came up to her and asked her name. Lena discovered the name assigned to this student upon her entrance into this world was Alt. Dr. Alt. Lena found herself wondering if there existed a Dr. Ctrl, Dr. Delete, or even better, a Dr. PgDown.

The two students clawed and fought their way through the barren terrain and loathsome crowds of IUPUI not once, but twice, before they had a destined meeting with their resident who quickly made it her mission to get rid of Drs. Lena and Alt and to assign them to Dr. Dor... Dr. Dor.... (well, lets just call him Dr. D for now) until Thursday. Someone in the administration must have fudged their pants while assigning students to residents to give them someone who wasn't at their assigned location for three more days.

Dr. Lena (who quickly became just "Lena" because of her quacky last name) and Dr. Alt soon found the doctor's workroom and in it were several busy looking folks . There were the nurses, the doctor who wore a suit instead of a white coat, and a few cheery looking residents. Suit doctor soon took charge of the terrified third years and left Dr. Alt to attend to a patient while he took Lena to see a 17 year old girl with Myaesthenia Gravis. This patient's room was where Lena met... we'll call him Dr. Baldy because I can't remember his name... and she and Baldy watched Suit doctor (whose last name was something like Pasqualihurkenhorkenshloofendoofen) do a workup.

After this patient, Lena got to interview one of her own, see a few more, and then have lunch in the University Hospital cafeteria with Dr. Alt and Baldy. She got to eat in the area reserved for doctors, which made her feel high and mighty. Any more high and mighty, and evil laughter and world domination plans would have surely come spilling out of her usually innocently quiet lips.

Lunch ended all too soon. You see, it takes more than half an hour to drink an entire cup of diet coke when the only available choices for purchase are huge, huger, and extremely huge. At least the sandwich was almost doable. Perhaps only a fourth descended into the Thank You bin.

Back on the Neurology unit, Lena, Dr. Alt, and Baldy were asked to come and watch a female neurologist (bubbly, and wearing mostly brown) do a workup on a very complex high fall-risk patient. The patient (J) had his buddy J-J (!) with him, and J-J did most of the talking. The most intriguing part of the exam was watching J attempt to draw a clock. When asked, he simply drew a line around the perimeter of the paper. When asked to try again, he did the same thing inside the first line. The doctor finally drew a circle for him and asked him to put the clock numbers in. This took an excruciatingly long time. Somewhere along the line he wrote the word "clock" on the paper so we could tell that somewhere in his mind, he was really TRYING!

Finally, the session was interrupted when J had to use the restroom. Perhaps even more slightly amusing was when a strangely haired male student (seriously, his short dark brown hair stuck straight out stiffly and horizontally from the front of his head) was given the mission of taking J to get a burger while they waited for a hospital bed to be prepared. Now THAT is REAL medicine.

Lena's next patient was a retired stewardess with Parkinson's Disease. Hers was a pretty typical case, however Lena was still honored when she was asked to stay late to write prescriptions, go over them and all new information with the patient, and even taste a placebo of one of the medications she was prescribing. It tasted of curiously strong grapefruit.

At the end of the day Lena, being her usual bumbling self, attempted to leave the hospital several times. In trying to find the first floor, not realizing she was already on it, she rode the elevator up to the 6th and back down. Then she doubled around and found the same elevators again before taking random turns to find the front of the hospital. It is worth mentioning that this was after a failed attempt to leave the neurology clinic itself.

Lena finally made it out of the hospital and went off to find a quiet place to study.
 
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