Dr Escalona Observation

Doctors are teachers. Growing up I always wanted to be both a doctor and a teacher. I would spend my days anticipating the times that I got to visit Dr. Ahr, my pediatrician and attend take your child to work day with my mother, a high school mathematics teacher. Last summer I realized that I did not have to decide; I could be both a doctor and teacher. This reality didn’t truly sink in until my eighth day shadowing in the general surgeon’s office. It seemed to be a typical day of observing Dr. Escalona’s pre and post-operative visits, until a patient presented with abdominal pain in an area where she had previously had a hernia repaired with mesh reinforcement. The patient was clearly frustrated and concerned about the reoccurrence of pain in that particularly familiar abdominal area. Dr. Escalona, who diagnoses hernias with certainty, using only his hands, felt her abdomen and confirmed that her intestines had once again bulged through a weak spot in the previously inserted mesh. The patient could not understand how this could have happened. Dr. Escalona then spent the next ten minutes teaching the patient about her condition, the potential outcomes, and the surgical treatment plans available. He took out his pilot G-2 ballpoint pen and began to diagram out the patients …show more content…
The patient gazed at the diagram, but her look was inherently different from an uninterested student observing a PowerPoint lecture in a crowded lecture hall. The patient wasn’t in class learning about something that merely might appear on their next exam, she was learning about the most relevant thing to her current existence! Instructors idealize about such personal interest and investment in the material that they present. This was when I realized medicines beautiful and inherent intersection with