Island Med Student

I’m sitting in my bed in my apartment in Brooklyn, New York. I am wearing comfy sweatpants and have my blanket pulled up as high as it will go while still allowing me to type. I have two pieces of toilet paper, crumpled up, stuffed in each nostril, soaking up copious amounts of mucus. The heat in my apartment is turned up to the max. My bedside table is littered with cough syrup, nose spray, ibuprofen, tissues, water, orange juice, chapstick, day time cold meds, vitamins, and honey. Every few moments, I have to stop typing to cough up some mucus into a tissue, or to change the “snot plugs” in my nose.

You might have guessed by now…I am sick.

What started out as a minor cold eventually turned into bronchitis, and I somehow then developed pneumonia. Life definitely sucks right now.

Yesterday was quite an interesting day. I came into the hospital at 8:00 a.m. for morning rounds. My attending physician took one look at me and told me to go home and to get checked out by a doctor. Since I have no primary care physician in New York, and since I didn’t feel like calling around to various doctors, only to be told that they weren’t accepting new patients, and since my health insurance is so crappy that I knew I’d be paying out of pocket anyway, I decided to take the elevator down to the Emergency Department of the hospital.

Now, at this point, I was still wearing my white coat and stethoscope, and when I approached the ED check-in counter, the friendly nurse immediately said, “how can I help you doctor?” When I told him that I needed to see a doctor, he promptly recorded my details and alerted the triage nurse to come take my vitals. Since I had to take off my white coat to have my blood pressure taken, I went ahead and left it off the rest of the time. Now, I was no longer a med student/fake doctor, but had joined the ranks of the patients.

After getting my vitals, the triage nurse handed me a cup and told me to get a urine sample and bring it back. All of the ED bathrooms were occupied, so I walked down the hallway to find an available bathroom. The only one I could find had a broken lock, but I decided to use it anyway. Halfway into giving my “sample” an elderly hispanic man opened the door, was surprised to see me hovering over the toilet with a plastic cup between my legs, mumbled something in Spanish, and then promptly closed the door. Yes, I was definitely now a patient.

I returned to the nurse, gave her my urine sample, and sat back down in the ED waiting area. Many hours went by, and many of my fellow med student friends came by to check on me, and upon realizing how long I’d been waiting, suggested that I use my med student status to get bumped up in line. They had apparently done this many times before. I thought about it, and decided that I didn’t want to. My visit really wasn’t an emergency, and I didn’t think it was fair to go ahead of all the other people who had been waiting just as long. It eventually became obvious to me that had I kept my white coat on, I would have received different and mostly likely faster service.

If I had to do it all over again, I would do it the same way. I kind of liked the anonymity of being just another patient, and not a medical student wearing a stethoscope. In fact, I think the only way anyone could tell that I was not an average patient was by the color of my skin (most of our patients are latino/hispanic or black) and by how I described my symptoms.

In fact, I think the doctor who eventually saw me thought it was a bit entertaining that instead of listing my symptoms as a runny nose, watery eyes and coughing up blood, I complained of rhinorrhea, excessive lacrimation, and hemoptysis.

Ahhh, the joys of being a patient! Now please excuse me while I change my snot plugs.

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