Just breathe.

It starts when I enter the room. How many words can the patient tell me without taking a breath? Is she leaning forward, hands on her knees? Can I hear her wheeze from across the table? Can I see her effort to breathe? Is her face blue, are her fingers clubbed? I am always watching. The stethoscope only amplifies what I can see.

First, I splay both hands across her back. “Breathe.” I feel the air moving. Next, I tap lightly in demarcated fields, listening for the hollow resonance. I feel for fremitus, asking her to vocalize a vibrating word as the sides of my hands travel laterally down her back, stepwise. Only then do I take the cold circle, universal symbol of the doctor.

My stethoscope hangs without weight around my neck. I can unwind it in a fluid motion, it tangles itself like a necklace, I am always entwined by my crescent of silver and single tube, encased in blue, leading to a bell and a diaphragm. It looks like a caduceus without wings. The snake head uncoils into my ears. My hand is on her shoulder now. I don’t have to count the breaths; I can feel them. If I pay attention, my eyes will close and my head will sway forward as the ear pieces find their natural places in my canals. They are transmitting sound. “Breathe,” I say. “Relax,” to the patients who await my signal to exhale. “Through your mouth,” I say. It’s louder that way. And I am listening to the inside of her body.

I am listening to the inside of the body. It is telling me things. My patient knows these things, but she doesn’t have the vocabulary to describe to me what is happening. All the viscera are innervated. The viscera are terrible historians, as we say. What we mean is, they speak a language we still do not know. Instead, it is my exquisite privilege to explicate this poem, through every sound and every silence. 

The poet teaches the doctor to listen, and the doctor teaches the poet what to listen for. Every day, I am the scribe to my patient’s story, to my patient’s body’s story. I call these findings “subjective” and “objective.” I am saying that my interaction with the body is neutral and that everything I report is without bias. I am saying that the body, itself, has no leaning and no dramatic metaphors.

I am lying. 

Nothing that is human is neutral. It's like pain - they say pain is the 5th vital sign now (on a whim, and to have something more to discuss with a preceptor, I suggested mood as the 6th vital sign. Last week). There are a lot of different "scales" for pain - there's the one with the frowny faces and the one with the numbers. Some people say 'on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being no pain and 10 the worst pain you can imagine..." 

"7" the patient says

"but now it's down to a 5"

We've got them trained well. (Personally, I scale pain from 0 to 10 for patients). The MAs ask, too, what the "acceptable" level of pain is. Medicine is getting so pc. We say - and this is true - that there is no guarantee pain will ever be zero.

So it's subjective. Totally subjective. And I used to deride this - okay, sometimes I still do. You look at the patient's face while you're palpating. One says "10" and is fighting to keep from screaming as I lightly touch their abdomen. As I'm just percussing/tapping. And another says "10" calmly, abdomen soft, nontender/non-distended with positive bowel sounds. So in my 'general' statement i'll say NAD for 'no acute distress.' 

And am I judging? I'm trying not to. I'm trying. But seeing those presentations - which I've seen - I instinctually guess which one is in more pain. And there are signs "related" to pain. That much pain, the heart rate should be up. The blood pressure should be up. And the respiratory rate should be up. Then again....

does it matter?

Okay, it's a culture of respecting high pain tolerance. Of course I'm part of that. And this isn't just talking to other friends about pain/illness, and feeling like "wow, that person is REALLY sick and they're not complaining at all!" or, "that person just has a cold and is complaining and I came to work when I was wayyy worse..." We do that. (At least, I do). This is seeing sick people/people in pain all day, every day, listening to people talk about chronic pain, injuries, acute things - and you see people with the exact same pathology and totally different reactions to it. I've seen this with procedures - three endometrial biopsies in a row, exact same procedure, exact same doctor. The women were about the same age, approximately the same level of health. One was totally non-chalant. Another was visibly uncomfortable and flinching. And the third was screaming. 

There was the patient with cancer. Every day I saw her, every day she smiled, said she wasn’t in pain. This was a woman with cancer metastasis all over her body. Dying. Young. Cachectic. On chemo. With platelets so low we transfused her every other day, and with that, her platelets were 1/30^th that of a healthy person’s. And so the one day I went in that she did say she was in pain, (a little), that she was fighting not to throw up or cry or….

I almost backed out of the room. I was terrified. For her to be complaining of pain… I couldn’t imagine how bad it was. Unimaginably bad.

Chihuly exhibit. I'm going to continue adding random photos...

But does it matter. Pain is subjective, but each person is a scale unto themselves. Other things affect pain – mood, situation … everything. But the person is the patient and you’re taking care of one person at a time. Only. So in that situation, the only scale that matters is that patient’s scale. (should matter).

Sometimes, though, it is important in management. Does the patient need to be hospitalized or can she go home? Is this IV or oral medication we’re going to give? And how much? And do we need a CT right now, are we sending the patient to the ED? What’s our threshold of suspicion for emergency, exploratory surgery?

This is why medicine isn’t science. There are things we have tests for. There are things we don’t. And you don’t run every test every time, because…it’s excessive, it’s expensive, it’s not always available, it can take a long time, they’re not all that sensitive/specific, and….there can be more harm than good. CT for everyone? No. Even chest x-ray for everyone? That’s probably the most common and benign one. …No. (could post the letter from UCSF professors to the TSA here. Not terribly relevant, but sortof. In terms of unnecessary testing and doing more harm than good. Medicine doesn’t do it. Medicine does too much of it. Don’t do it and hide behind the medicine in order to say it’s safe and just as benign as what doctors do. Doctors aren’t benign. )

 Hiking in Kenya. I wish I remembered the exact name...it's in Western Kenya, not far from Kisumu, and pretty much exactly on the equator. There are little remnants of the equatorial rainforest over here...it's almost the exact same latitude as where I lived in Cameroon, but it's mostly Sahel, now. Scrub. 

Easy science is derided as “physics for poets,” and – to scientists or to a community at large – poetry is esoteric and “too hard to understand.” To poets, science is inflexible, uncreative, and daunting. Science makes itself out to be intimidating. And, personally, I don’t count science libraries as “real” libraries, and I go there as little as possible.

But medicine isn’t science. In medicine, there is judgment. There’s not supposed to be – but there are tumor boards and transplant boards, and as hard as they try to be objective…they’re just not. I saw a patient in the ICU – 39 year old in kidney failure, I think – who had been declared “futility of care.” Takes a few doctors to do that – at least two – to say we’re not going further, we’re not offering anymore “life-saving” or “heroic” measures. I guess. *I haven’t looked this up. It’s not an official definition, I’m approximating – but it’s pretty close. Anyway, thirty nine. And why futility of care, why wasn’t he on the transplant list? Lack of social support. That’s a criteria – hard to get through recovery and post-recovery for transplant on your own. He was married. But his wife was a polysubstance user – aka, in normal parlance – junkie. So no transplant for him.

Medicine speaks an entirely different language, and not just in medical terminology. Medicine turns commonplace English words upside-down.

“How is the patient mentating?” Thinking. Are we judging? Yes. Cognition, alertness and orientation. We are also judging the patient’s relationship to the world, as if we know how to govern that.

“Is the patient’s sensorium intact?” Is the patient hearing voices or seeing things that other people do not see? Is the patient feeling things that aren’t there?

Medicine auscultates the heart, lungs, carotids, and abdomen, rather than listening.

Rather than mildly sad, a patient is probably dysthymic, and if they feel normal, they are euthymic. “Thymus,” to ancient Greeks, meant heart, soul, desire, life. In adults, it atrophies, and in opening a cadaver, it is almost gone.

~j