a wake up call

"The patient I saw today bikes! I wonder if he rides on this trail!" I thought casually as I ran down my newly discovered path. Instinctively I shot the idea down. "That's not real." I reminded myself. As I caught the direction that my thoughts were leading me, I was shocked at how 6 weeks of studying and 2 days of fake, standardized patients had trained me to see the key points instead of the whole story. When we're given exams, we're expected to take a clinical vignette and pull out all the high yield information and ignore the rest. During my clinical skills board exam, I was instructed that it's less important to empathize and more important to get the information you need quickly as we only had 15 minutes with each patient. After 6 weeks of dwelling in that mindset, how do we avoid an overlap into our patient care?

The better I've gotten at knowing "what's important," the worse I become at hearing the 'unimportant details.' The details that are meaningless to the medical diagnosis are often the most important factors for my patients. This is part of the essay that I wrote with frustration several months ago:

"As I mulled over the nomination to Gold Humanism Honor Society and the prompt for this essay, I couldn’t help but to remember all of the ways that I fall short in compassion, empathy, and patience. The countless days where I’m tired and my patience runs low with both colleagues and patients. The annoyance I feel when I walk into a room that’s full of family members with lists of questions when I have far too many notes to write before rounds. The urge to interrupt and cut off my long winded, lonely patients as they wax on about their long list of complaints.

I was frustrated and disappointed in myself as I realized all the ways that I fail to be empathic and fail at the very thing that drew me to medicine. But then I realized that what matters most in medicine is how we react when we’re tired, sleep deprived, busy and feeling burned out. My short-comings don’t define who I am as a future physician, but how I act on these emotions that will determine the type of doctor I become."

I was told by a mentor last year that if you aren't careful, you'll wake up in 10 years and be a doctor that you never planned on becoming. Compassion and care are something that need guarded and attended to. Perhaps this is an area that I need to attend to more carefully if I desire to preserve the gifts given to me in stewardship.