Positive things to think about when you’re feeling crushed on hospital service
Sometimes when I’m tired and sad from doing medicine (usually on hospital rotations) I look at discoveries like insulin, vaccines, and antibiotics, and just marvel at how far we come.
So here’s a list of things we don’t have to deal with
- children in wards of 50 or above dying of diabetic ketoacidosis while their parents watch helplessly because we don’t have insulin
- thousands of people dying or becoming paralyzed due to polio, because of the persistence of one
- people dying from something as simple as otitis media as it caused mastoiditis, and eventually abscess formation which could form in the brain itself and cause seizures (yup, this guy used to be untreatable and cause death!)
- the possibility of us not biting our nails waiting for LP cultures to oh god grow something let’s just hope it actually does for things like meningitis (obviously not limited to this - we can now do it for blood cultures and even URI symptoms. Expensive as all hell but incredibly useful)
- The tragedy of Rinaldi in a Farewell to Arms
I am running out of things right now but I might expand on this later on when I’m feeling down again.
