One of the joys of internal medicine is being able to address almost all of your patient's needs. Unfortunately, two of my recent patients have ended up needing attention to their more private parts. One, who came in for diabetic ketoacidosis (out of control diabetes), revealed during the physical in the ER an infection underneath the foreskin of his penis. Evaluation of such an infection involves making sure that the foreskin can be fully retracted and then put back into place. Naturally, I received some flack when reporting the findings of my genitourinary exam to the residents, but it was all in the name of our patient's health. The next day, however, I had to report that his infection had worsened and evolved to include swelling along with some discharge. On the same morning, one of my other patients developed a rash on his penis. So at morning report, I got to describe not one, but two male itchy parts!! The residents, of course, had a field day speculating about whether I was spreading some infection to my patients. All I want to do is catch babies, people. How come I have to deal with the itchy boy parts?? Ew.
Things aren't all fun and games in medicine though, we're working right now with a patient who came in with high blood pressure and had a stroke while he was in the hospital. It's really hard to think that he came in walking and talking and now, under our care, he has decompensated to the point that he can do neither. I am hoping that he will recover some function or that we can at least prevent him from deteriorating further. The worst part is that he is relatively young - in his 40's - so this turn of events seems especially tragic. Cases like his really emphasize the limitations of medicine even in our state of the art hospital.
On a personal note to h - I'm on call on Wednesday night, so I'm DVRing PR and will watch it on Thursday ;)
2 comments:
Boy parts are icky. Sorry you have to look at itchy ones. Just think soon you will be catching babies and the only boy parts you are going to have to deal with will be very very tiny :-) and presumably not itchy. Miss ya, Tay
i gotcha i gotcha. good thing you told me. although i'm actually going out that night myself...concert tickets purchased before I knew PR would be final-y-ing that same night. but we don't have dvr :( so i will wait to read your blog, should you choose to mention anything about it, until after I've seen it. Are you planning to check out top chef? for some reason I got sucked into last season...probably because of the SF factor more than anything. I thought we were the only ones who watched it, but I guess not since there is a season 2. lovin' the doc stories--keep em coming...ooh, err, i didn't mean, um...well, you know. hee hee
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