What's this?! A single-day blog post released on the day about which it's written?!?!?! Madness!!! Check out the previous three catch-up posts I finished today
here,
here, and
here.
Today I started my holiday-shortened week of inpatient neurology. This mostly consists of stroke patients, which is, let's say... less than uplifting. This morning was spent walking room to room testing patients' neurological deficits while families looked on with either false hope or resigned acceptance. The deficits are usually the same as the day/week before and most of what was their loved one is now gone. The questions become: How much of the person is left? Would the patient be happy living like that? Where do they go from here?
 |
| It's sad, but this is very accurate. |
TIL: With "locked-in syndrome," where the conscious mind is preserved within a paralysed body, voluntary vertical eye movement often returns and enables communication. It's easy enough to test; today we talked to/at a woman in a post-stroke vegetative state and told her to look up and down, or to look at the doctor's face that was out of her vision above her gaze. Her eyes simply continued sliding left and then whipping back right, like she was watching an eternal typewriter.
No comments:
Post a Comment