Syedyshev Oleg
Syedyshev Oleg

Humorous Essays Based on students' memories

"All have died
except for those who are alive, and those whom we remember"Confucius

Essay 159. The Gypsy Baron

One can argue about bad doctors we have, and how badly they teach students medicine. I absolutely do not agree with the statements. We have good doctors and they taught medicine, at least, my generation, really well. Those who wanted to study studied and became not just fine, but wonderful, outstanding professionals. As for the fact that we had some mishaps that was the very learning process, a doctor goes through for all the period of his practice. For instance, I was so much disappointed and grieving, when after my arrival to the village of Chashi to work as a surgeon, during the very first surgery I could not for three hours find appendix of my patient. Only after I called to help me a local gynecologist Lubov Andreyevna, and she found it, I performed appendectomy. Yes, later I remembered that we had been told at the institute, that a caecum could be located behind peritoneum. Though, we had not been shown it even once, as there had happened to be no patients of that kind.
And there I had my first patients and with such a unique case. And the appendix was a phlegmonic one. Indisputably a label of a booby and not of a surgeon could be stuck to me. However that was a great experience to me!

And later it helped me. In my surgical practice I had one more similar case, and, believe me, in that situation I acted up to the standard and right away suspected retroperitoneal location of appendix , and the surgery lasted even though not fifteen minutes, but neither four hours as well.

And here is a case from medical practice of my fellow student. I am not giving her full name because of obvious reasons; let’s call her Sveta in this story. I will tell you the “horror” story with her permission. Everybody knows what Kusko’s mirror is. It is familiar to practically all women, though they may not know its name.
So one day a young gynecologist Svetlana had an appointment with another young specialist, a village school teacher, where both of them worked during their first year after graduating from their universities. Thanks God, the patient had nothing serious, and after examining her Sveta honestly told her so. The young teacher happily left the office. Though Svetlana had almost finished receiving patients at her women’s consulting office, when Anna (the teacher) entered her office again. She complained that something was making her uncomfortable!?... No problem, Svetlana quickly put Anna on the examination chair had a look and …, her jaw slowly fell down… “My goodness”, - Svetlana thought, - “How could I do that?” She left the Kusko mirror in her patient after examining her in the morning.

Svetlana felt how her cheeks turned red under her gauge bandage. She quickly regained her self-control and in a confident voice announced: “I am sorry, I left a prophylaxis tampon, but forgot to tell you about that, it’s good that you’ve come yourself”. Svetlana told me that she had sensed that Anna did not believe her, but just pretended as if she trusted her. And Svetlana in her turn acted as if she was confident that Anna believed her. To Svetlana’s good luck, Anna was a calm and even-tempered girl, so she raised no scandal. Anyway literally in a month she got married and left for Mezhdurechensk to join her husband, so they never met again. However Svetlana remembered that case for all her life and later, when she became a head of a department in a big hospital, she always told about it to the beginning doctors and nurses. Amazing enough, but respect to her among the beginners only increased after the story.
The both cases were with Svetlana and me after our graduation from the institute. And here is a short story, which happened during internship after the fourth year. It was told by the very Svetlana. She had her surgery internship at a hospital of railway industry in Novokuznetsk. Somehow it happened so that she was the only one from Kemerovo Medical Institute there, the rest of the students were from Tomsk. So one day all of them were sitting in a doctors’ lounge discussing in a slightly joking manner the surgeries they performed, of course they were the doctors who discussed the surgeries, and the students were sitting with their mouths wide open listening to them. A nurse entered and reported that a patient from the ward # 7 had urinary difficulty and he was making a lot of noise for the whole department to hear. And the patient was a Gypsy, and not just a Gypsy, but a Gypsy Baron or something like that; he had adenoma of prostate, so he was absolutely forbidden to drink alcohol. Every time after a party his sons brought him to the hospital, and he was annoying doctors at the department for a couple of days until his urination restored back to normal in a natural way. Everybody at the department knew the patient. With the help of a metal catheter he was urinating easily, and the procedure was not a problem. Why the head of the department sent Rimma, a female student from Tomsk, to perform the urinary excretion procedure on the Gypsy remained an enigma. Though, Rimma left proud of the trust.

A couple of words about Rimma herself. She was petit and about one meter fifty centimeters maximum tall. She had a very fine slim figure. She always wore miniskirts, and her doctor’s smocks were of medium length. So when flaps of her doctor’s smock opened a bit, that was very spectacular. To cut it short, that very cute babe left to help the old Gypsy urinate via a catheter. In about five minutes she rushed into the doctors’ lounge, her eyes widely open, her doctor’s hat cocked and shouted: “I’ve broken the catheter, I’ve broken the catheter”.

Sure enough everybody jumped and ran to the #7 ward. One had to see the poor old Gypsy… It’s not clear what kind of manipulations she was performing with the catheter and the object it was applied to, but the man, and the Gypsy even though he was a mature one, but still a man, responded in a natural and adequate way to the manipulations. Rimma estimated that, as if the catheter got broken inside urethra and raised panic and called for help loud enough to be heard in all corners of the department. Yeah, it was good that the internship was over in a couple of days, because every morning at the end of the morning conference somebody always asked, if any of the patients had urinary retention? And everybody was laughing loudly, and Rimma was laughing together with them her face red like a beetroot.

18 June, 2013

© Copyright: Oleg Syedyshev, 2012
Publishing licence #214040300523

Translated by Viktoria Potykinato content