Q2 - JOURNAL ENTRIES

Journal entries from the second quarter of my second year in basic specialist emergency training:

• • • I’m treating a twenty-something-year-old whose left testicle ruptured after a kick to the groin. It couldn’t be salvaged and had to be removed, but I confidently assured him that they would give him a testicular prosthesis to even everything out. Turns out, that doesn’t happen routinely. Oops.

    • Speaking of scrotums, I cauterised a bleeding skin tag on an older man’s ballbag. It was a two-minute job, yet he left me a glowing review on Facebook afterwards. Kinda funny how we can spend hours working on one patient without receiving so much as a simple thank you, only for someone else to become our biggest fan after we cauterise their scrotum.

    • A patient who didn’t leave me a glowing review:

      • • Me: Have you been vaccinated against tetanus?
        • Patient: Who, me?
        • Me: No, your cat.

• • • I ask a patient who has presented with chest pain and fever whether she uses any recreational drugs, as part of the routine history. She vehemently insists that she doesn’t. Later, I order a respiratory viral swab, and she begs the nurse not to document it if it comes back positive for THC. I tell her that it has. She immediately freaks out, so I quickly admit that I’m joking. A respiratory swab obviously doesn’t test for THC. Petty? Perhaps. But if she could lie to me, apparently I could lie back, no? 

    • The cutest older woman presents with a head injury. She has severe dementia, and her husband tells me that he has to remind her who he is every few hours. This is our conversation:

• • • I just had to tell a man who had moved to Malta to begin a new life as a driver that, following a witnessed seizure, he would have to stop driving and undergo specialist assessment before he could safely return to work. Not fun.

• • • I pull back the curtains expecting to find my patient. Instead, I find his relative picking her nose. “Gotcha!” I say.

    • The referral form from a long-term care facility states that the patient was found “on couscous”. I assume they meant “unconscious”.  

    • My patient requested a different doctor on accounts of me resembling a local singer who she simply can’t stand. To be fair, I can’t stand him either.

    • A  young guy with an ongoing heart attack just signed against medical advice to go out for a smoke. Priorities, I guess…