I've just started medical school and will be chronicling my experiences in a series of "Doctor in Training" essays on TIME's Healthland blog. You can read the first installment here. An excerpt:My very first patient died — twice.
Less than a week after our White Coat Ceremony — the symbolic start of our medical education, in which we donned short white student coats in front of faculty, friends and family — I, along with a dozen other first-year medical students, am training in basic cardiac life support.
Our mock clinical scenario: an elderly woman (fortunately, a mannequin, whose vital signs the EMS instructor makes up as we go along) collapses in a ShopRite supermarket, aisle 3. Unresponsive, she has stopped breathing. We check: no pulse. The instructor is quizzing us on the emergency response protocol. Then he asks a different type of question: “Is the patient dead or alive?”
Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2012/09/14/shock-and-awe-dispatches-from-a-first-year-med-student/#ixzz26SjxUhY3
