Sunday, February 17, 2008
blind chicken boy
we in south africa have been making it easier to study medicine. after all medicine should not be restricted to the 'privileged' few who have more than 3 possible synapses in their brains. we are truly the country of opportunity.
however, this may not necessarily be a good thing for patients.
when i was in witbank, we had a house doctor who could possibly be the stupidest person without diagnosed mental retardation i know. and he was a doctor. we nicknamed him blind chicken boy after the brilliant nando's ad that i've posted here. when he tried to examine patients, sometimes we had to move him up to the patient, like the trainer in the video.
he is the only guy i know who admitted a patient with a glascow coma scale (gcs) score of zero. when the other house doctors took him aside and told him the lowest gcs you get is three, he retorted that his patient's was zero. end of story. i must give him credit although for also being the only house doctor who admitted a patient with a gcs of 18. once again, if 15 is the highest, i assume the patient with 18 was hyper aware. i immediately looked for him. i wanted to ask what the meaning of this life on this mortal coil is. i couldn't find him though.
a friend of mine was in orthopaedics clinic. blind chicken boy came in and stood sedately at the door. my friend continued with his patient. it was a guy that had been operated for a fracture and needed his stitches removed. once the stitches had been removed, my friend turned to blind chicken boy. blind chicken boy said,
"doctor, i have a problem." he began everything he said with these words.
"what is your problem?" asked my friend dutifully.
"the patient in the ward with the tibula fracture has changed condition." only blind chicken boy knew what a tibula was, but we all assumed it was a bone somewhere.
"how has he changed condition?" asked my friend.
"he has just stopped breathing."
so blind chicken boy, when he came across a patient who stopped breathing, he had the presence of mind to call his senior. it seems a pity that he slowly walked to his senior, leaving the patient alone and then waited for his senior to finish with the out patient that he was busy with. no one could accuse him of being rude and interrupting people who were busy.
there was the other story when another friend was on rounds with blind chicken boy. they found a patient who was not doing as well as expected. my friend barked out instructions. get a full blood count. admit in high care. give a bolus of 300ml ringers lactate. report back.
about 2 hours later, when everyone was beginning to wonder what had happened to blind chicken boy, he suddenly turned up.
"doctor, i have a problem."
"what is your problem?"
"i have been looking everywhere and i can't find a bag of 300ml ringers lactate. there are only 1 liter bags."
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13 comments:
So where is he "practing"? I want to be sure I never go there.
Oh, and the video if too funny!!!
Fun ad!
Hmm, we educators have a duty. Sometimes that duty is to correct the student, sometimes to defend the student. They must always be in a protected environment where the most fearful entity is dishonesty or dishonor, not mistakes or failure. But sometimes, our duty is to explain to the student that they belong in one of life's many other pursuits.
C
That is funny, well sort of. There used to be a GP at the first hospital that I worked in. I looked to him for inspiration....if he could become a doctor, I knew I could become a Dr.
chris, how much i agree with you. as with all things, it is much more complex in south africa. not only dare we not advise blind-chicken-boy-esque to find something else to do, but we most definitely dare not hold him back (essentially fail him). take a look at http://other-things-amanzi.blogspot.com/2006/11/power-to-people.html
it is an old post but goes at least some way towards explaining some of what i'm referring to. there is more to it though.
Everything about this post scares me, Dr. Bongi.
Um, American medicine ain't got nothing like this, right?
Or maybe, we ain't seen nothing yet? Please post more on this topic!
That's world-class dumb, all right.
Ouch. I would be seriously concerned for my health if he was any where close to me for that matter.
Hilarious.
Thank you Blind Chicken Boy for once again delighting us with your wit, at least half of it. You stand testimony to all that Doctors are not superior people, and in special circumstances, ie yours, some doctors are inferior.
The Colleges of Medicines of South Africa's logo states: "The College is opposed to all forms of discrimination". Fortunately for Blind Chicken Boy that includes discrimination against the mentally retarded.
My favourite 'yard stick': Dr Bongani, known also to the author of this blog, (please note the difference in spelling of the name) once put an intercoastal chest drain into the wrong side of a chest in a tension pneumothorax case because he couldn't tell left and right on the chest X-ray and looked at it back to front. Yes there is SOOOO much wrong with this case. He then sent the patient to the ward for repeat Chest X-ray the following day and went to sleep! Dr Bongani is diligently doing his bit for overpopulation on planet earth.
When I was working at a day hospital 2 years ago, there was a doctor who thought that he should insert a chest drain on the right side for a patient who had a left sided pneumothorax because 'the heart is on the left' and he didn't want to injure the heart! Oh yes, this really happened!
F**k me , that is really first class dumbness.
Eishwena. That is all.
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