touch and confidence

It is said that touch is healing for patients, that they want to be examined and seen.  What nobody told me is that touch can be healing for the practictioner.

After what essentially amounts to five years spending quality time with my computer, I am constantly talking with people: attendings, residents, nurses, techs, security guards, and of course patients.  I see people who are not my own age, race, class, educational level, occupation, political philosophy, culture, or worldview.

It is only now in the buzz of interacting with people that I realize how profoundly lonely I had become during my PhD.  I loved what I did, but there wasn't enough human interaction.

Now, I am part of a team, doing work that makes a difference to the healthcare of patients - or at least to my own training for future patient care.

I have come a long way in the past three months.  When I started the back-to-clinic practice patient exams, I was so anxious about doing the right sequence of steps or causing a patient discomfort that I had almost no brainpower left to pay attention to what I was seeing and hearing.  Now, I am starting to notice lung crackles, heart murmurs, strange neurological exam results; I am looking at the patient to observe breathing, state of health, agitation, and/or mental status.  I'm at the point now where my mom mentioned a rash, and I found myself automatically taking a history: Where is the rash?  What makes it worse or better?  What does it look like?  Have you had anything like it before?  What is the temporal and spatial pattern of presentation?

After the first four shifts in the emergency department, I am starting to feel more comfortable speaking with patients, occasionally making little jokes, examining them, and getting a better idea of what questions to ask.

 I was sitting down tonight for dinner and realized that for once, I am not lonely.  I touch people, and am touched by them.  But the craving that I had for literal human contact is diminished, because that deep-seating animal part of me that needs the presence of other mammals is starting to be filled by my work.  I expect that in a few months, I will crave solitude and time on my own to counter-balance the increased social demands of being a medical student.