A focus on technical and scientific advances in patient care takes us ever farther from our role as healers.
Mary was my first ever patient. I’m calling her Mary, though in truth I don’t remember her name. She was 70 if a day, I barely 21, in the first month of my clinical clerkships, proud of myself in my still clean new white coat. She snoozed, an early afternoon snooze, in a sunny corner bed by a window in Dr. Barnaville’s female ward.
A decade or so earlier Mary had undergone an alcohol injection into her gasserian ganglion to alleviate trigeminal neuralgia, a procedure that left her with some facial anesthesia and eventual return of her pain. Significant worsening of this pain had led to a hospitalization to try some different medications. The resident told me to examine her cranial nerves.
Prior to entering the ward I sat on a hard wooden bench in the corridor carefully reading how to examine the cranial nerves in the pocket version of McLeod’s “Clinical Examination”. As bushy-tailed as my white coat was bright, I moved from Olfactory through to Hypoglossal, felt confident, and entered the door.