these days, my blog is full of medical stories. but some stories are best forgotten.
during my registrar years i had an intern who worked for me with the most amazing story. what is more amazing was that the incident happened in cape town, where she studied. when she moved to pretoria, she could have buried the story in her home town, more than a thousand kilometers away. but no... a group of the interns working together got together one night for a braai (south african word most closely translated as barbecue). as the beers flowed, they started swapping stories. i suppose in an attempt to fit in, she relayed the story of the matrix move. she will never live it down.
she was a student rotating through urology. she was sent to insert a catheter into some guy. she had never done this before, but her registrar had explained to the group when they started briefly how it was done, she went for it.
step one, the registrar had explained, was to squirt remicaine jelly, a local anaesthetic cream, into the meatus opening and milk it down. this is to ensure that the entire urethra was at least slightly deadened to the otherwise extremely unpleasant procedure.
being a caring person, she squirted a generous amount of the jelly into the meatus and began milking it down, possibly a bit too vigorously.
being a somewhat naive girl, i assume she was only too grateful that she didn't need to support the member too much as she readied the catheter.
then came the insertion of the catheter. as she started, assuming it would be fairly painful, she milked a bit more to make sure the urethra was well covered by the remicaine jelly and started the procedure. almost immediately the patient called out, "ek kannie meer nie!!" (i can't any more). the caring student, assuming the patient was experiencing discomfort, immediately started milking the jelly down with possibly too much enthusiasm. it was just after this that the student realised the patient's prior supplication had nothing to do with pain, at the exact moment that she was forced to do the matrix move to evade oncoming substances.
like, i'm sure, most of my readers, i just could not believe this story. so i did the obvious thing. i asked the person involved. she did not deny it which was enough for me.
11 comments:
As naive as I was in med school that could have been me. Thank God it wasn't.
Oh dear. Yes, I was that naive, not long ago. I think I've got some stories - words only - that come close; but you bet I'm not talking. :)
Thank goodness our patients are asleep before the foley goes in. Of course this doesn't stop the young males patients from standing at attention sometimes.
Reminded me of a cute story so I posted it.
http://intraoporate.blogspot.com/2008/01/reading-bongis-post-this-evening-i-am.html
I wonder if the embarrassment had anything to do with her move..? :) I'd have to move to a whole new continent lest I actually make eye contact with that person even again!
now that's just funny
oh my. That's just too funny. Almost as funny as a med student who tried to mark the surgical site for hemorrhoidectomy...
Give that guy some credit. I can't think of anything less erotic than having someone try to shove a thick piece of rubber tubing down the middle of my penis while I was awake. Clearly, it had been a while since the poor guy had been "serviced" in such fashion.
Impressive. Even with anesthetic he popped off after what could only have been a few strokes. Makes me feel better about myself.
Hilarious! And to think here in the US such an event would only draw praise as it would have certainly improved quality/customer satisfaction survey scores (you know, the real data that defines successful clinical outcomes)
Sid: I had barely recovered from laughing at the story when I read your comment...GOLDEN!
Thats funny. An intensivist I know was highly disturbed last year when a similar thing happened (though being a non naive bloke he clicked as to what was happening pretty early on), and afterwards the patient said "ah, I had an idea that might happen".
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