“Arzt, helfen Sie“
“Was?” I thought… (“What?”)
Why are all these nurses and medical personal approaching me?…Why did I get asked for help in German? I barely speak German. Ich spriche bisschen Deutsch; no more, no less.
I’ll retrace my steps for this all to make sense. That is, how did I end up in the middle of a surgical floor of a teaching hospital and perceived to be some sort of legendary physician.
It all started after I put on my scrubs and walked out to meet everyone in the hallway. Shortly after, the head anesthesiologist dropped everyone off at a theatre (OR). One by one, I said goodbye to my friends as they entered their assigned theatre. Goodbye, Tchuss, Auf Wiedersehen
, ciao. I specifically remember saying farewell to my good friend Young Jun because he was the last one with me.
After YJ enters his theatre, I accompany the physician for quite some time while he figures out what to do with me. You see, my assigned theatre was unavailable. It was under some sort of maintenance and no surgeries were being done there. So, I ended up on the other side of the hospital; where good colleagues Ana and Joshua) were diligently shadowing.
The surgery team did an excellent job on the several kids they operated on. After a few surgeries, I was directed towards the physician lounge. Perhaps here is where the mis-portrayal begun. I ate with several physicians and nurses. We had potato soup and coffee. I ran into my colleagues after this and showed them where the lunch was. After they ate, we decided it was time to go home; we were only supposed to shadow until 1pm anyways. So my colleagues decided to accompany me to grab my civilian clothes from the changing room on the other side of the hospital.
Now this is when stuff got weird.
Do you ever feel like you’re lost in a dream? I really like the movie Inception- it’s one of my favorite movies really, no surprise that it’s a DiCaprio movie- I like a few quotes in the movie. In particular, I like the way they describe dreams; he says in the movie that “You never really remember the beginning of your dream. All of a sudden, you’re in some place, with some people, at some time, but it just all makes sense in the moment.”
That’s how this moment felt because we were looking for the changing room for moments short of eternity and as each moment passed, more and more hospital staff saw me as an Artz- a physician. Ana and Joshua seemed like my pupils since they had already changed into their civilian clothes. We walked on every floor of every wing of the hospital. On one of the ICU floors, a person even asked where something was (we only know because they said “Wo ist”). Towards the end of our search, I felt a sort of familiarity in the floor, a De Ja Vu moment if you will. Here, This area was absolutely buzzing with medical staff. Joshua and Ana decided to sit and wait for me because they felt like outsiders in their civilian clothes.
I, however, was dressed like everyone else. I entered the gates and searched for the room. I put my chin up and puffed my chest and pretended I knew exactly where I was going. Perhaps the hospital staff thought I was a newly signed physician they hadn’t seen before. Perhaps they thought I was a physician that only works on Thursdays. Who knows. The truth of the matter is that they didn’t stop to question me once. “Fake it till you make it” right?
Fast forward some and I found the changing room. I changed and we left the hospital. What an interesting experience.
Because of all these events, this has been one of the most insightful weeks yet. I have had the opportunities of shadowing physicians in the US, Colombia, Spain, and now Germany, and this experience provided me the chance to compare and contrast hospitals in each place. I am very glad we were able to go to the Uniklinic.
The week was also insightful because of all we learned in school. We continued working on Enmodes which is still stressful, but I feel we are making excellent progress. Physiology is as entertaining as ever. We are still covering neurological content, which as I’ve mentioned before, I find particularly interesting. We have our first exam next week so it’s time to start really cracking down on the material in order to destroy the exam. What a week! Auf Wiedersehen!
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