Month: April 2016

Famous One-Liners of Fiction: A Medical Quiz!

The one-liner is the distilled essence of a medical case. It packs relevant history, lab values, and individual assessment into a single, concise sentence. My question: why limit it to medicine? Can you figure out which fictional characters the following one liners describe? (answers below)

1) 13 y/o male with a history of forehead dermatitis who presents to a British castle with myopia.

2) 40 y/o male with history of heavy alcohol use (1 L of rum per day) and being cursed with the inability to die who presents to Tortuga looking for pirates and more alcohol.

3) 58 y/o male with history of murdering people for political gain, high risk sexual practices, and giving creepy soliloquies who presents w/ recurrent nightmares and marital discord.

4) 30 y/o G1P0 from Naboo with history of elaborate dressing and being completely duped by a sith lord who presents at 39 weeks for induction of labor by a robot.

5) 2,019 y/o wizard with history of osteoarthritis and schizotypal personality traits who presents with an acute paranoia relating to jewelry.

6) 39 y/o male with history of childhood trauma, dissociative identity disorder, and affluenza who presents with mysterious bruises and scrapes he got “while working out” //// 39 y/o male with history of kicking everyone’s ass who presents with hoarseness and acute laryngeal edema.

7) 9 month old bilingual Pacific Regal Blue Tang with a history of irrepressible optimism who presents with recurrent bouts of amnestic fugue.

8) 54 year old evil medical professional with a history of alopecia areata and diabolical scheming who presents for psychodynamic group therapy after confessing homicidal thoughts towards his son, Scott.

9) 40 year old ogre with a history of acromegaly and depression who presents with severe jaundice.

10) 28 year old male with a history of watching the girl he loves be hit on by best friends/future arch-rivals who presents with total body hirsutism and leaky wrist discharge.

11) 47 year old imperial officer with a history of thinking that Vader’s commitment to the force is a “sad devotion to [that] ancient religion” who presents with acute respiratory failure from asphyxiation.

12) 43 year old archaeologist with a history of confirming Judeo-christian theology and killing nazis who presents with an erythematous forearm rash after an aberrant whip recoil.

13) 21 year old snow queen with history of heat intolerance and Raynaud’s syndrome who presents with cough, nasal congestion, and chills after blanketing her surroundings in a permanent winter.

14) 27 year old female with family history of incest and preternatural leadership abilities who presents to clinic inquiring about vaccinations for her three pet reptiles.

15) 36 year old eccentric male billionaire with history of heart transplant and hemochromatosis who presents for biannual pacemaker interrogation.

 

Answers:

  1. Harry Potter
  2. Jack Sparrow
  3. Frank Underwood
  4. Queen Amidala
  5. Gandalf
  6. Bruce Wayne /// Batman
  7. Dory
  8. Dr. Evil
  9. Shrek
  10. Peter Parker
  11. That guy from Star Wars Episode IV who thinks it’s a good idea to question Vader’s methods about returning the stolen data tapes
  12. Indiana Jones
  13. Elsa of Arrendale
  14. Daenerys Targaryen
  15. Tony Stark

Battling the Self

I don’t know about you, but I am prone to very bad anxiety. The topic of my discontent almost doesn’t seem to matter, from ruminating about my future to pondering my less-than-stellar performances in Settlers of Catan. My brain can dredge up levels of angst like waves, crashing my cortex and drowning my inner reason.

If it weren’t so awful, there would be a beauty to it. How you completely lose yourself to your worries. How the anxiety seems to wrap its way into your deepest thoughts and feelings and color them, like a teabag releasing its contents into hot water. Everything is ruined. I’m a failure. I’m not smart enough. I’ll never be good enough. It’s almost impressive how quickly and completely we can convince ourselves that the sky is falling.

Our brains are deft. Mine is excellent at detecting a topic that will cause anxiety. Like that weird Harry Potter creature Lupin shows to his Defense Against the Dark Arts class, our thoughts effortlessly morph to prey on deep-seated fears. What my brain isn’t particularly good at, though, is maintaining a sense of proportion. This was made abundantly clear to me this week by my patient Ms. Gonzalez.

The first thing I noticed about Ms. Gonzalez was her smile. Despite her very low blood pressure, despite the central line inserted into her jugular vein, despite the fact that she had been in the ER for almost a day, she was smiling. Her lips were taught and tight, bunched in against the puffy skin of her cheeks. This was not how Ms. Gonzalez was born. Her face had taken on a new, rounded countour from years of steroids used to control her underlying disease: Systemic Lupus Erythematosus.

Ms. Gonzalez is twenty five years old. She was born with Lupus, a debilitating autoimmune disease made famous on the show ‘House’ for its myriad presentations and problems. The body makes antibodies against itself, attacking normal tissue as if it were a pathogen. From the day she was diagnosed, Ms. Gonzalez has been taking multiple immunosuppressive agents daily to protect her from herself.

Something about Ms. Gonzalez’s smile shocked me. I felt embarrassed, almost. What have I been anxious about? Seriously, what even could I be anxious about, compared to what this person has gone through? She is afflicted by rashes and scars, by painful ulcers, by inflammation of the lining of her heart and lungs. Her kidneys may eventually shut down, tethering her to a dialysis machine for life. She’ll have early arthritis. Neurologic damage.

The worst part is, she did nothing to deserve this. She didn’t drink too much. She doesn’t use IV drugs. There is no sense of justice to be found here. This is in her DNA. Her illness is something she has been forced to confront on a daily basis. There is no running away from the thousands of doctors appointments and hospital admissions. No running from her warped skin, bloated where it was once smooth.

When I told her that the infection in her bloodstream had cleared and that she would be going home, she giggled with delight. She thanked me and said how happy she was to be going home soon. In her sparsely decorated hospital room, with old, frayed curtains separating her from three other moaning patients, she was radiant.

How does Ms. Gonzalez keep smiling? I don’t know. But I can’t stop thinking about her. She knows something about anxiety and suffering, deeply, that I haven’t figured out yet. In the face of fire, she was peaceful, happy, gracious. Unencumbered. Surely, if someone is allowed to be anxious or depressed, it’s a young Lupus patient with sepsis. But she wasn’t.