Medicine.

So there's this old lady in the ward right now, who quite definitely has dementia, who's delirious as well right now, for which we're investigating the cause1. She's very suspicious of all the nursing staff in the ward for some reason, and think that they're trying to poison and/or harm her2. She doesn't seem to be too afraid of me though. Thinks I'm nice, apparently, and was willing to take some oral morphine for the pain that she had been having from chronic back pain.
I've heard one of the nurses mention to another that it was because I actually kneel down and speak at her level when I do talk to her, and actually do spend quite a lot of time with her.
It's interesting, this speaking at eye level business. I do it purely for practical reasons when doing odd jobs - there are only so many ways you can protect your back, you can either raise the patient to your level (which a housemate whom I shall not name does - she elevates the patients, them being on those electric beds, to about her arm's height. And remarks without a trace of irony that the poor elderly gentlemen and ladies go "whee I'm going on a journey up high") or bend down, which is particularly bad for your back when you're a junior doctor having to do multiple cannulas/take many bloods, or get a chair, which involves more trouble than it's worth. I've never noticed that I do it consciously though, it just seems more comfortable talking at a similar level, talking to, rather than at patients.
Anyway she keeps talking about knowing the "goodies from the baddies", and as I assume as she's still talking to me courteously I'm on the "good" side I can't help but be smug about the fact that I can put on a 'caring' face when I do care. Maybe it is good, being so transparent, sometimes.
I'm so glad that despite the criminal shortage of doctors on the medical wards (and I do almost mean it literally) and the overload of work I've not turned into a "baddie". Just yet.


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1Delirium, medically, is what you get when you're physically ill, when your mind goes haywire after being bombarded by too many signals from your body when things are going wrong. Which incidentally is a marker of poor prognosis (of life, in general). Which is why you do not actually want to get delirious with joy.
2Actually probably because of various reasons, including the ritual taking of observations at odd times of the night, the administering of drugs in huge trolleys that look like poison shelves, and the eerily colour-coded uniformity of the, well, nursing, uniforms. Probably not the best particularly when you're scared and they put you in a separate room because you're causing trouble for them. Oh and try to give you poisons when they're already sneaking poison into your meals and drinks.

Reflections.

If there is just one sentence (ok two) that I remember from my 4 months in psychiatry, it's this - "there are people who choose psychiatry because they like to analyse others' words. And then there's people like us, who just care."

This was in a conversation with the old age psychiatrist I was working under, when I disclosed to her I was interested in psychiatry as a career.

And then there's people like us.

Fucking psychiatrists.