Clinical Case Review

Because the Human Health and Disease class is taught by two practicing doctors, our classes take place at whatever hospital they are working at for the week. For the next upcoming week or so, we are getting a change of scenery from Gentofte Hospital to the newer, Hvidovre Hospital...which, unfortunately for me, is in the opposite direction of Helsingor, making my commute home roughly 2 hours. (Wah wah, complain complain, yep, that's me.)

Last week, we had a guest lecturer who walked us through a diagnosis of a patient. It was very House-esque, with him quizzing us on what signs we should look for in a patient, what tests we should run, and what our hypotheses were given certain symptoms. The 87-year old patient came in presenting with confusion and a fever, not a lot to work with, but after a systematic assessment, we were able to diagnose her with a Urinary Tract Infection (UTI). If I have learned anything from watching House, it's that it is never MS.

Today, we got the chance to interview an actual patient and take a general assessment/medical history. Sounds cool, in theory, but we ran into one tiny problem -- a big gigantic language barrier. What ended up happening was, the doctor would translate our questions into Danish, the patient would answer the question in Danish, then the doctor would translate the answer into English. And the poor patient, bless her heart, was this little old lady who just could NOT stop talking. We would ask her one question ("What were you hospitalized for?") and she would launch into a 5-10 minute story about a hip replacement she got x amount of years ago that made her legs of uneven length so she had to wear special shoes with different heels...only to find out at the end of the story that it had nothing to do with her actual hospitalization which was for her broken arm. We would ask a question, listen to 10 minutes of Danish, and receive about 1-2 sentences worth of relevant English. By the end, the poor doctor was so fed up, he conducted the interview by himself, took us outside, and had us interview him instead. I guess we learned today that communication is very important. It is so difficult to find that balance between listening to your patient's life story, no matter how irrelevant to your case, or risk sounding rude and cutting your patient off to wheedle out the pertinent information. 

Definitely an interesting class today. Highlight? Getting to wear a long white doctor's coat and sweep my way dramatically down hallways with the coat swirling behind me like a cape. What can I say, I get my shits and giggles where I can.