Maurison looked after my various allergy-related afflictions, so over the next few years I ended up spending a lot of time in his office. Since I was his godson, no part of the building was considered out of bounds to me. I’d leaf through his illustrated medical textbooks, count the bones in the artificial skeleton hanging in the storage room, marvel at the distorted cortical homunculus figurine and puzzle over arcane pieces of medical equipment in the various cupboards and drawers. The one I liked best was a device similar to an egg timer that he often carried in one of his lab coat pockets. As far as I could tell, its only function was to ring loudly 30 minutes after it was switched on. One day I asked him what it was for.
“Oh that,” he grinned. “If I’m running late and I’m about to see a patient who tends to ramble, I turn it on before I go in. When it starts ringing I exit under the pretense of having to take an urgent call from the hospital. It’s not exactly kosher, but sometimes that’s the only way I can escape from an examination room!”
“Wow,” I thought, as I left his office that day, “Life-saving work. Cool gear. A dash of subterfuge. Aside from the lousy hours, medicine’s not such a bad gig after all… .”
*
When I was 19 my family moved from Jamaica back to Canada. We arrived in Winnipeg a few weeks before I was scheduled to enter university. My grades were excellent, but I had no clue as to what I wanted to study. Education? English literature? Law? In the midst of my tortuous deliberations I got a letter from Paul, a good friend from my high school in Jamaica. He informed me that my old flame was dating a medical student. What?! That did it. In the blink of an eye my decision was made – I’d take the prerequisite two years of health sciences courses and then apply to the Faculty of Medicine.
The following essays and anecdotes chronicle some of the experiences I’ve had over the course of my medical career. It’s been a fantastic adventure, and it is still unfolding.
*
P.S. Several years after I graduated from med school I discovered my friend got the story all wrong – the fellow my ex had dated had been studying aviation, not medicine. I’m glad Paul didn’t get his facts straight, otherwise right now I’d probably be somewhere up in the stratosphere piloting a 747. And I really hate flying.
PART ONE
Learning the Ropes: Med School
and the First Urban ER Year
Welcome to the Machine
There is nothing more exciting than opening your mailbox and finding a big, fat envelope from the medical school you applied to. Skinny envelope – not so good. Those contain cachectic little one-pagers that may as well begin, “Dear John… .” A bulging envelope, on the other hand, means you’re in like Flynn. I got mine back in the spring of 1983. At the time my parents were both teaching up in northern Manitoba and my brother had already left for school, so I had to do the Snoopy Dance by myself. Didn’t matter. I was still the happiest guy in the world.
Nowadays when I reflect on how cavalierly I approached the entire med school application process I shake my head in disbelief. Not only did I not bother to take any MCAT prep courses, I only left myself enough time to write it once before the application deadline. I elected to apply to a single medical school rather than to the customary five or six. Lastly, I refused to wear a suit to the all-important interview (those were my fractious motorcycling days, and at the time I felt suits were definitely not cool). Despite my best passive-aggressive attempts to sabotage myself, I got in. Then the real fun began.
My first inkling I wasn’t in Kansas anymore came on the first day of term when each of our seven lecturers assigned us roughly 25 pages of reading homework. 175 pages wouldn’t have been that difficult had we been granted a few days to slog through the material, but they all seemed to expect we’d have everything memorized by the next morning. On day two another 100-plus pages were piled on. And so on. By the end of the first week we were drowning in paperwork. But med school was just getting warmed up… .
During the second week we began working in the cadaver dissection lab, or Gross Lab as it was affectionately referred to by our preceptors. I had never even seen a human corpse before, never mind taken a scalpel to one. I was so wigged out by the concept that the night before our first trip to the lab I had a nightmare about working down there alone and turning around to find a cadaver sitting up and staring at me. It was like something straight out of The X-Files. I woke up in a pool of cold sweat.
The next morning 99 nervous newbie first-year medical students filed silently into the lab. As we answered the alphabetical roll call we were assigned six to a body; three down the cadaver’s left side and three down the right. Once we were all in our proper places we were given the order to unzip our respective body bags. When I peeled open our bag, the distasteful tang of formaldehyde leapt into the air. Although no one keeled over and face-planted like those poor saps in the opening credits of Quincy, I have to admit we did all take an involuntary half-step backwards before pausing to inspect our cadaver. Approximately 60, male, tall, thin, left forearm anchor tattoo. Dead. A few seconds passed and no one in our group moved forward. After another several seconds I realized what was going on – no one wanted to be the first to touch the body. We eyed each other nervously. Then the fellow next to me leaned over and raised the cadaver’s wrist. He furrowed his brows and pantomimed checking for a radial pulse.
“So tell me, Mr. Jones,” he said in his deepest baritone, “how long have you been feeling this way?”
We all burst out laughing, picked up our scalpels and got to work.
The Peds Ortho Blues
In the winter of 1985 my classmates and I were turned loose on the unsuspecting wards. At the time we were “baby clerks,” fresh out of two years of sitting in our medical school’s darkened lecture theatres and still struggling to make sense of the countless thousands of pages of physiological facts floating around in our heads. My own clerkship rotation schedule kicked off with a one-month stint on the notoriously busy pediatric orthopedics service. I wasn’t the least bit worried. In fact, I was confident I’d be making more saves than Hippocrates and Grant Fuhr combined.
On the first morning of the rotation I arrived on the ward at 8:30 sharp. A quick search of the area failed to reveal any doctors, so I made inquiries at the nursing station. A harried-looking ward clerk stopped stamping requisitions long enough to inform me the team had finished rounds an hour ago. Since then the house staff had gone down to the ER to see some consults and the surgeon had headed off to the outpatient clinic. I decided to check out the latter.
When I got there I was surprised to find the waiting room already full. Inside there were four rooms. The orthopod saw patients in three of them while the plaster technician applied casts in the fourth. One of the examining room doors was closed. I could hear muffled voices behind it. I walked over to it and was poised to knock when the door suddenly banged open. I was nearly bowled over by a short, 40-ish, balding fellow with thick glasses. He was wearing greens, a lab coat and purple clogs. He thrust his right arm out, shook my hand briskly and said: “Hi, I’m Dr. Stone. You must be my new clerk. Glad to have you aboard! You can just follow me around for now.”
Without further fanfare he rushed into the next room, expertly grabbing the file out of the plastic chart rack beside the door as he went by. Upon entry he pulled a small tape recorder out of one of the pockets of his lab coat and proceeded to dictate a note on the child he had just seen. He paused for a second to introduce himself to the new patient’s parents and shake their hands. He then resumed dictating. When he was finished, he slipped the tape recorder back into his pocket and nodded at the parents. Thus cued, they launched into a description of their child’s problem. Every so often Dr. Stone nodded his head and grunted knowingly. When he figured he had enough to go on he scooted over to the examining table where the little girl was sitting and began twisting her left knee in every possible direction.