Friday, February 6, 2015

Albertine, the Homicidal Future Physician

This is obviously not the real "Albertine," as I don't have a desire to be sued.



I'm probably being mean in sharing this here, but there is a female in my medical school cohort who is approximately twenty-eight years old. For the sake of argument, i'll refer to her as Albertine, although that's obviously not her real name. If she'd been allowed to pick her own name, however, she might very well have chosen something as stupid-sounding as Albertine***, as she's just that lacking in intelligence.

I cannot for the life of me figure out to whom she's related, with whom she has slept, or on whom she has some really amazing dirt that would allow her to have even been allowed to enter the building, much lest to have lasted a full quarter and not to have been invited to make a hasty yet graceful exit  out of the school.

This woman is so freaking dumb that today, with one fake patient presenting symptoms of  a fracture of the cervical spine (C1 through C3), she ordered him to be transferred by wheelchair for lab work - toxicology  for traces of opiates, etc., and didn't even communicate a radiology order, much less transport the poor hapless actor  pretending to be a patient to be placed on a stretcher and immobilized. That's probably because she missed the last four obvious drug seeking fake patients the prof threw at her, but still, you err on the side of caution where any broken bones are concerned, much less a suspected cervical spinal fracture.

Additionally, today she ordered an endoscopy for a fake patient with lower right quadrant pain. She would've had to cram that endoscope all the way down the poor woman's esophagus, through her stomach, and nearly all the way through the colon to gain any useful information whatsoever, and I don't think they make endoscopes that long, never mind that the minor sedation typically prescribed for an endoscopy would have been woefully insufficient  for essentially scoping a patient from mouth to bungholio in one fell swoop.  Albertine probably shouldn't have ordered anything more invasive than a simple digital rectal exam, which she herself wouldn't have had to actually perform, as we don't have to invade fake patient's body cavities in this phase of our training. It's all theoretical. What she should have ordered was a blood panel, and specifically a white cell count, in addition to the digital exam, to be followed by a likely CT scan. She likely would've killed the poor lady had it been for real.

I'm not nearly so "in the know" as some of my colleagues, who are keeping a body count on her, but Albertine is supposedly approaching triple digits in terms of numbers of patients she would have killed just through testing procedures alone.. That doesn't even count those she would have paralyzed, such as the C1 through C3 patient yesterday.We haven't even begun to formally diagnose, much less actually treat even the fake patients.

I'd REALLY like to know who or what  Albertine knows  that is allowing her to remain here. Perhaps she's just here for comic relief of the part of the professors and their assistants. I heard a couple of them laughing hysterically last week when she ordered  an MRI for an actor who was supposed to be impersonating a patient with either influenza or the measles.

If she somehow, through the grace of the anti-God of medicine, makes it through all four years here or anywhere else,  I'll email anyone who asks me to do so in order that you may avoid the medical facility at which Albertine completes her internship -- unless you're looking for a way to facilitate assisted suicide, in which case Albertine will most certainly assist you, intentionally or otherwise.

6 comments:

  1. Wow... she sounds like a real ding-a-ling.

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    1. Fortunately this quarter doesn't feature a lot of group work om which we're actually graded. One guy took her scalpel away and refused to give it back last quarter during anatomy lab.

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  2. I remember when my cousin was in med school being appalled by some of ditzes in his cohort.

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    1. I'd guess that there's no system in place to keep every idiot in the planet out of med school programs. The peculiar thing is that she doesn't even seem smart enough to cheat successfully. She's been in bed with someone important is my bet..

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  3. Maybe she's a plant to make everyone else feel better about themselves. Then there's the old saying (at the risk of being censored), "Its not who you know, but who you blow."

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    1. Jono, I would never censor you. Seriously I don't think they care enough about any of us to do one single thing to make us feel better about ourselves. It's more likely the "It's not what you know . . ." scenario.

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