My First Patient: My Worst Impression
“First impressions are the most important.”- (18th century proverb)
She was never really my patient. I never learned her name; I didn’t diagnose her or treat her. I barely spoke to her.
But it was my first day of medical school and she was the first patient I ever examined, so I guess that makes her my first patient.
The exercise was called “Clinical Correlation.” Under the supervision of our attending, Dr. Abe Sunshine, our six-student group got to play doctor with our white coats and drug-company-gifted stethoscope.
Self-conscious about being the only student wearing a Kipa, or coming from the City University rather than a prestigious college, I deliberately invite every everyone else to go before me.
My patient is a shy buxom Latina teen. I have to listen to her heart.
My own is beating so loudly, I pray to God I’ll be able to hear hers. I thank God she appears very cooperative.
I know just enough to place my stethoscope on the left side of her chest. I hear Gunisht Mit Gunisht.
Sunshine asks if I hear anything. I shake my head.
“That’s because you’re listening to her rib-cage, Ike. With her permission, you have to lift her breast to place your stethoscope under it over her heart.”
She is comfortable with that; I am not.
No one knows this Yeshiva Bochur has never before even seen a naked female breast, much less touched one. Everyone however knows my hand is shaking so hard her breast is jiggling like a Jell-O mold in an earthquake.
Everyone, including her is giggling. Except me. I still hear Bupkis.
“Why do you suppose you can’t hear anything, Ike?”
I notice the stethoscope’s chest-piece has two different diaphragms. I try to keep her breast elevated with the back of my hand as I switch them.
I am unsuccessful. Her formidable breast falls making a “Thwap!” sound. Thank God, she doesn’t seem upset by it.
Lifting her breast again, my hand is sweating so much it slips out like a watermelon seed. “Thwap!” again.
When I finally succeed in re-hoisting it, my hand is shaking so much her breast starts undulating like a wave approaching the beach.
I desperately lean forward to listen again, but all I hear is everyone’s now unabashed laughter. I can see how it’s funny. To everyone else.
“Any idea why you can’t hear anything, Ike?”
Yeah, because it’s my first day of medical school and I don’t know my gluteus from my olecranon! (Truthfully, I didn’t even know those terms, but you get my drift.)
I also don’t know why he is persisting in humiliating me like this. He knows I know zilch.
I wish to God I wasn’t wearing my Kipa, embarrassing Him as well as me.
I want to tell Sunshine to stick his own stethoscope where the sun don’t shine!
“Why don’t you ask your patient, Ike?”
Why? To humiliate myself further? How would she know? She’s a high school student not a doctor, for God’s sake!
I turn to her anyway. She sympathetically motions to me to move the stethoscope’s earpieces from my neck into my ears.
(PS, it works.)
Seven years later, when I open my practice, several of my initial patients are referred by Dr. Sunshine. I’m delighted, but shocked.
When I bump into him at the hospital, I (foolishly) remind him of that incident, asking him why he would refer patients after my embarrassing failure.
He replies, to the contrary, I didn’t fail. I passed. I never said I heard something (as much as I was tempted to.)
She was never really my patient.
She was my teacher, as was Dr. Sunshine.
I remain eternally indebted to both.
