Constipated Teaching

Since I am practicing in a teaching hospital, besides treating patients, part of my duty is educating and training residents (doctors-in-training) and medical students. In fact the state university even gave me an academic title. My official title is: Adjunct Clinical Associate Professor. Adjunct, means extra or accessory. In other words, not that major. Maybe “A Junk” Professor is more appropriate. In my native language, saling-pusa.

Anyway, most of the time when I am seeing patients in the hospital, I am accompanied by medical residents or medical students. In the ICU though, my entourage could be quite large, composing of 2 to 3 residents, a medical student, a pharmacist, 1 to 2 pharmacy students, a respiratory therapist, and respiratory therapy students. Then when we round on a specific ICU patient, the nurse taking care of that patient will join our discussion too.

Having a group shadow me on my rounds has its perks, as many of the scut work the team could already accomplish in my behalf. Plus the bigger the entourage, the bigger the likelihood that people think you are important (not mere “a junk”), just don’t let that get into your head. But it has its disadvantages too. For one, I have to ask permission to break rounds, every time I needed to go to the restroom.

In our rounds, besides talking about the patients’ cases and our plan of treatment for each one of them, we also discuss about snippets of medical teachings, current trends of practice, new drugs and even latest research that support our plan of management. Thus I really needed to be updated on the most recent guidelines and studies.

Few weeks ago, as I was conducting my ICU rounds, we have been dealing with some very difficult cases as well as some unfortunate patients in our ICU whose chances of surviving were slim. As we went through consecutive depressing cases, I could sense the sadness and stress rubbing in into my team. I could feel the morale of the team was low, for taking care of these sad cases of patients.

As the captain of the team, besides making sure that the right management is given to each of our patient and assuring proper education and adequate training for my residents and students, I feel that it is my duty as well to keep a high spirit in my team.

One particular patient that we have was having a bad case of constipation that was made worse by his requirement for pain medications, on top of all his other life threatening conditions. We then discussed causes of constipation and its management in general. One complication of using opioid pain medication is constipation, as it can slow down the intestinal movement. So we decided to give our patient the relatively new injectable medicine for constipation that blocks the opioid receptors in the gastrointestinal tract without decreasing the pain relieving ability of the opioids.

Then I asked the team, “Have you heard of the long-awaited big study on constipation?”

They all looked at me shaking their heads as they have not heard of it, and anticipating more words of wisdom from me.

To this I said: “It has not come out yet.”

Realizing that I made a joke, and not to be outdone, our knowledgeable pharmacist chimed in, “But I heard of the recent study that said that diarrhea is hereditary.”

The team was smiling now, and seems to be in a better mood , waiting for the punchline.

The witty pharmacist concluded, “Because it runs in jeans (genes).” Eeeww!

With that we moved on into our next ICU patient.

*******

Pahabol na hugot: Constipation ka ba? Kasi I cannot get moving since you dumped me.