Being a med student is like being the third man in a three-urinal public bathroom when the two bookends are taken and only the middle one is free.
Think about it. Doctors are exposed to the world's most outrageously uncomfortable situations anyway. Everyone in the hospital is sick and vulnerable. Everyone in the hospital is bleeding, pooping or peeing. Everyone in the hospital knows that it is the doctor's job to hear about all of the bizarre things that are bothering them. Mostly, everyone in the hospital is naked and none of them seem to care if you see them.
For me as a med student, it's doubly awkward. Because not only am I supposed to do the same things that the doctors do, and not only do some of the patients actually think that I'm a doctor (yeah, I know, weird), but it's not even like I can do anything to help them.
Mostly, what I do is wake patients up in the middle of the night to ask them silly questions so that I can tell people more important than I am the answers. When I'm not doing that, I barge into patients' rooms in the middle of the day when they're talking to their families and ask them silly questions so that I can tell people more important than I am the answers.
And when I'm not doing either of those things, I'm changing bandages or putting in tubes in a way that certainly takes longer than it would take a real doctor and that probably is less comfortable for the patients, too. While I do all of these things, I sweat because I'm nervous like a pre-gastric bypass John Popper doing a concert in the Amazon rainforest.
But the strange thing is that the patients never seem to mind. (I shouldn't say never. Some of them do mind. In fact, a lot of them have minded, especially when I was waking them up at 4 a.m. to ask if they got a good night's sleep. But generally, when I come back at a normal hour, they're actually appreciative.)
I'm not sure if they recognize how hard I'm trying, or if they feel sorry for me, or if they're just generally nice people or if maybe I don't seem as incompetent to them as I seem to myself (Naaaaahhh!). Whatever it is, not only do they not mind, but they actually treat me as though I'm a doctor. They'll show and tell me anything.
One of my patients spent seven days with a urinary catheter in his bladder even though he wasn't particularly sick. Even though he was walking around the halls, eating normal meals and spending most of his day sitting in a chair watching television, he had to do all of this with no pants on since he had this tube sticking out of his bladder.
My job was to come in and check on his abdominal wound while he was in the hospital. And every time I went to tactfully adjust his bed sheets and his gown so that I could look at the wound without seeing his private parts, I'd fail miserably and he'd flash me. And the first eight or so times I did this, I was really embarrassed.
But after a while, it dawned on me that the patient wasn't embarrassed. And I would've just chalked it up to his being the type of person that isn't easily made uncomfortable, except it kept happening with other patients.
All of these people allowed me to examine their most private areas without even a second thought. The only person who thought it was awkward was me.
And now every time I see another patient naked, or when another patient tells me that they can't prevent themselves from urinating in their sleep, it almost doesn't feel awkward any more.
I'm not going to go so far as to say that I'm comfortable hearing and seeing things these patients don't even tell their closest friends and relatives, but it's getting better. And sometimes, I can even help the patients, by explaining something or telling them that they're normal or (usually) by getting the person who can help them. And hey, I've got to learn to do this sometime.
So I still feel like the third man in the bathroom, but since I've really got to go, I just do it.
Alex Fanaroff, Trinity '07, is a second-year medical student. His column runs every other Thursday.
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