"Take physic, pomp..."

"...Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel..." - William Shakespeare, King Lear, III(iv), 32-33

A patient once called me a vampire. MK - not even close to his real name - had reasonably assumed that I'd come to take his blood. To stab him in the cubital fossa with a 21-gauge needle and slowly suck out his sanguinity, like someone else had done the day before, and the day before that. He was joking, of course; despite all the humours drained from his sickly 80-something-year-old body, MK had heroically retained a sharp and snappy sense of humour.

He was something of a poet, and in his spare time - of which there is plenty when you're stuck in hospital - he gave his biro a good workout, and was always happy to share the fruits of his labour with the treating team. One of his poems was about about the anonymity of the hospital experience: the whirling in and out of interns, residents, staff specialists, nurses, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, dieticians et al, a wealth of assorted names and faces, people you'll meet once then never hear from again.

All medical students are vampires. Trawling from ward to ward, pouncing on the patient with the rare murmur, the ghastly ulcer, the classic history. And with the predictability of the vampire emerging from his coffin home at night, come exam time we would file into the wards and pester doctors and nurses for all the "good cases", as though our careers depended on it.

There is not much 'therapeutic' that a medical student can offer to patients on a day-to-day basis, though one tool we do all have is the healing power of listening. In many ways, listening - I mean really listening, measuring every word, blocking everything out of your mind and immersing yourself in the patient's suffering so you can the see as they see, feel as they feel, even for just a moment - is the best way to say "thank you" to the patient who has been good enough to give you their time, their story. And often, it's the only way.

nil disperandum,
Treasonably Reasonable