Blog Post: 2/19/16

Hello again,

I have now been in Puget for around a week and am just starting to adjust to the time difference and busy work life of the doctor I am shadowing. We have been very busy racing around town and the mountains for house calls and hospital calls, barely squeezing in time to eat and sleep. However, even though it is taxing and long and difficult, it is, most of all, super fun.

On my very first day, we had a practically full practice in which- in one day- we saw nearly 50 patients. Then, afterwards, we did a few house calls that took a lot of time because it took almost thirty minutes to get to the actual house! Here, I am really seeing another side of France that I really had never seen and that is the countryside. There are some very small towns with very few people and lot of animals and nature.

Then after those house calls and after we finished up at the medical practice, we went home to have dinner. However, we were on call and of course around ten at night, we got a call from a hospital almost thirty minutes away. When we arrived, we discovered that not only was it to assist a death but also that the man who was dying happened to be the father of the last patient who had come into the practice that day. What had occurred was that this 84 year old man was perfectly fine until fifteen days ago when he experienced an AVC, which is the french acronym for an accident vasculaire cerebral which basically means a stroke. Because of this incident, he went from a happy, healthy senior to an impaired, dying man. When we entered his room, we automatically saw that he was in a lot of pain and that his 'pauses' were long, therefore indicating that he was, in fact, near-death. So, in the dark of night, in a room with peeling, pale paint and under a flickering, yellow light, Dr. Godart administered two doses of morphine and we spent that night, with his daughter, watching him slip into the cold embrace of death. And, that was only my first day!

Since then, there has been nothing as extreme and intense but there has been plenty of stuff just as depressing. When we visited the retirement home, I was able to personally give basic check ups, such as measuring pulse, blood pressure, breathing, for several patients and most had severe cases of dementia or Alzheimers. It reminded me of my time volunteering at Hospice but unlike that time, I much more enjoyed it here because I really felt I was helping them and making a difference. To sum it up, even though I am seeing a lot of pain and suffering and undergoing a lot of back-breaking work, I am having the best time and loving every minute of it. This experience so far has definitely reaffirmed my want to be a doctor.

Thanks for reading and I'll post in another few days!