Summary Of Lisa Sanders's 'Every Patient Tells A Story'

Diagnosis “A man has a heart attack and is rushed to the hospital, where the blocked coronary artery is reopened. In the ICU, his blood pressure begins to drop; he complains of feeling cold and nauseated. The doctors order intravenous fluids to bring up his dangerously low blood pressure. They do not examine him.” Lisa Sanders told this story in her novel, Every Patient Tells a Story. She uses stories about patients that she has had and stories that other doctors have shared with her. And every story has a point she tries to prove. In the small bit I had just told you about, the man ends up dying on the table. She tells this story to prove physical examinations on a patient are important, and very useful. There’s other stories in this book …show more content…
Sanders opens a door that talks about how doctors are more reliable on medical technology to diagnose. She tells a lot of cases where a physical exam could have or did save someones life. A lot of the outcomes was that doctors had overlooked and didn't acknowledge a physical exam when the clue they were looking for was right in front of them. There are three major parts of this process, which are observation, touching, and listening. Observation is one of the most important roles. Sanders tells a case where a man at the age fifty-two had skin that was flushed and gleaming with sweat and tears and experiencing neck stiffness and pain, a cough that left his throat raw, his head pounding, and his joints in his legs, arms, and hands felt tight and sore. He also told the doctor he felt like a old man and could barely get around. He would get really cold every afternoon at four o'clock then suddenly be “hot as hell” as he stated, his temperature would rise to 103-104 degrees every night. This repeated everyday at the same time. He ended up going the the emergency room for a temp of 103 degrees, muscles of his neck were painful, several enlarged painful lymph nodes below his jaw, and his joints in his hands and knees were tender. The doctor, Heubner, thought he had Lyme Disease, but the medications he was given before hand wasn't working, then they thought he had meningitis which if …show more content…
Doctors often listen to the lungs, gut, vessels in the neck, and most importantly the beating of the heart. The stethoscope is one of the most handiest tools used in the medical field to hear the noises our body makes. One exam that Sanders talks about is the heart exam, and how its a subtle exercise and requires well-developed skills to detect the difference from a expected heart sound to a abnormal heart sound. She tells a story about a patient, fifty-eight years old, had high blood pressure since she was a teen. She has seen so many doctors and they had yet to figure out what exactly was causing this problem. No medications worked, she was put on every medication her doctor could think of. She then went to Yale to see a doctor, Dr. Shin Ru Lin, she did a physical exam and had discovered a unexpected noise after placing her stethoscope down on her chest. Between the lub and dup of a normal heart beat there was a brief murmur, she described it as a snarl of an angry animal. The doctor had noticed this noise everywhere she placed her stethoscope on the left side of the chest. Then examining the abdomen she heard another noise, a soft shush-shush over the renal arteries. Dr. Shin Ru Lin ordered a echocardiogram, knowing whatever these noises were it would show that it was coming from an abnormal cardiac valve. The results from the echocardiogram detected that this patient had Aortic coarctation. This is when the aorta