Pink is for Party!

Tonight is my last night shift!!!!!!! Yeah baby!

And I've decided to lighten up and wear my pink Giordano polo (you know the one!) to work this evening... I think I've scared the nurses but who cares! After tonight I wont see them again!

It's time to celebrate... to 'boogie' (as Dr K would say) and to eat red frogs* (Dr M's way to unwind)

I don't know what it is, but I have some kind of magical presence on the ward which means I somehow manage to bring a stabilising force to patient's clincal condition. In 7 nights I've only had to pop in 4 or 5 cannulas (in total!) and managed to only have 2 MET calls. None of the other interns can believe my luck (they call it luck... I call it "the zone")

So tonight I have my Coke, my chocolate, my iPod and I'm ready to party all night long to Mandarin pop music.

Earlier this evening, all the terns were invtied to a pharmaceutical company dinner which was held at a local restaurant. For once the med students were barred from the free food (suckers!) and so us interns scored a free dinner at a very classy Italian place. However the old adage is true and there IS no such thing as a free dinner, no matter what those drug reps tell you.

We were conned into listening to an old cardiologist talk for ages on the wonderful new advances in lipid lowering therapy (oh the excitement is just killing me!) and when he had finished we were assualted by the cheesy drug rep who blabbed on for ages about his drug... except I noticed that his graphs were not to scale (54% is not 3 times the size of 27% no matter how much you fudge that bar column graph) and so I felt like we were being taken for a bit of a ride. There weren't even any "Numbers Needed to Treat" (the sign of any good therapies outcomes) which he assured me would be published in November (we'll I'll just have to wait till November before I prescribe it now, wont I?)

Then to top it off, he started becoming all chummy with us... some feeble attempt at repore which I'm sure they get taught at "Drug Rep College" which failed abismally because he started telling us about his wife's grandmas' funeral whilst still trying to sell us a drug... come on?

However during the night we ended up sitting next to the speaker who was what I would call a true 'physician'.

To be perfectly honest, I see medicine as a job and not much more. Sure it's fun and rewarding but so are many jobs... I'm not one for the whole "I am doing medicine cos I wanna help people" (although I did say that when I was 16 and wanted to get into med)... at the end of the day, I work for the hospital and they enter into a contract with me and pay me what's owed. I hold no huge altruistic notions towards the whole thing and am happy to take it or leave it.

However there once existed (long before drug companies and indemnity insurance took over) a type of doctor known as a physician. This sort of man (very few females were physicians in those days) actually cared for his patients and had all sorts of noble virtues which he endowed in his practice.

To him, medicine was both a science and an art.

Medicine was a honoured profession and whatever a doctor said was taken as gospel.

People worshipped the ground doctors walked on. Mothers urged their daughters to marry such men.

And this man tonight was one of them. He spoke of studying under Parkinson (of Wolfe-Parkinson White fame) and under Steele (of murmur fame) and under emminet British cardiologists who ruled the empire of their specialty. Of entire crowds of junior medical officers trailing the physician on his midnight rounds in order to eat the crumbs of wisdom that fell from his lips.

He had a sad look in his eyes as he spoke of a bygone era... a time when physicians were benevolent and medicine had a 'romance' to it (to quote his words). As he looked upon 21st century healthcare he saw a lost generation of doctors who would advance our field into the future. He saw a youthful workforce changed and demoralised by the litigation and lunches (from drug reps).

I felt sorry for him as he dejectedly spoke of our profession. He had seen what was before and what was to come and lamented. The future is not always brighter as the world woudl have us think. The way forwards is not always the way up.

The complacency of modern medicine is it's biggest weakness. We have extended people's life expectancy so that now 75% of those who have ever lived over the age of 75 are alive right now! Thats a scary thought!

So what are we to make of all this? Amidst the drug rep dinners and the aspiration-towards-something-more-noble, what should we do?

Well I think someone much wiser than me put it the best:

"Let us eat and drink,
for tomorrow we die"**


*Dr M has a rather disturbing relationship with red frogs. She buys packets of them and carries them around hospital to munch on. But at night time, rather than take a temazepam to sleep... she puts two red frogs under each cheek in her mouth and then goes to sleep whilst the red frogs dissolve overnight... apparently her mother initiated this bizarre ritual which we now think would be reported as a form of child abuse if done today.

** 1 Corinthians 15:32 - Paul argues that if death is really the end of things, then why not live life to please oneself? Thankfully the resurrection of Jesus gives us hope beyond the grave. Our lives now have purpose before we die as we live in light of that hope.