Godzillacoccus

2003-02-17 - 5:41 p.m.

Today I was traumatized. If you're smoking, put out that cigarette right now and don't even think about picking up another one. Ever.

You know how during your driver's education class in high school they sit you down and make you watch a video called "Red Asphalt?" I assume they still do that. You sit there and look at the aftermath of reckless drivers. You learn what brains look like on pavement. You see blood running in the gutters. You see families devastated by the loss of loved ones. They show young people these things in hopes that it will make them think twice about speeding and being careless on the road.

In pharmacy school they do the same thing. They showed us a video of the results of reckless pharmacy. The worst part was when they started talking about pharmacists who didn't ask their patients if they are pregnant and let pregnant patients take teratogenic drugs. They showed some of the horrible birth defects that resulted from such incidents. There's one that I still remember specifically. They showed a newborn baby laying on its back. It was dead. Born dead. They rolled it over. There was no back to its head. In fact, there was no inside to its head. It was born acephalic. It was born without a brain.

Last week I saw my first end stage AIDS patient. It was truly horrific. But all of these things I have just described are not as bad as what I saw today.

One of the good things about medicine is the language. To an outsider, it may seem as though "medical-ese" makes no sense and is just something doctors do to be able to talk over their patients. But really, that's not the case. Medical language is made up of a very finite number of prefixes, suffixes, and roots. Once you learn them, you can mix and match them to say anything you want to say and everyone can understand you, even if you are saying something they've never heard of before.

For example, today my team was asked to consult on a lady who underwent a hemicorpectomy last night. I'd never heard that word before. So I thought about it a bit. Break it down, you've got "hemi," "corp," and "ectomy." Ok, so we all know "ectomy" means removing something. Like tonsillectomy or appendectomy. "Hemi" means half. And "corp?" Short for "corpus," or body. This lady had half her body removed.

Back in high school I used to play a computer game called Doom II. It was one of those games where you run around and blow monsters up. In one level it took place in a room that used to be a torture chamber. It showed a guy twitchingly impaled on a big spike, bloody body parts, and most memorably, the upper half a guy who had been torn in half. When I heard the term "hemicorpectomy," that guy was the guy who flashed into my head.

When I saw her for the first time she looked like anyone else. And basically she was. She was a fifty year old woman with two children aged twelve and thirteen. She had a long smoking history which led to some pretty severe peripheral vascular disease. She eventually had to have an artery grafted from her aorta in her axillary region all the way down to bifurcate to both femoral arteries. It worked well. Until it got infected. They treated it with antibiotics, but the infection raged beyond the help of drug therapy. The graft failed. They removed it. She no longer had any blood supply to the lower half of her body. She died from the waste down. So they performed a hemicorpectomy. She no longer has legs. She no longer has a pelvis. Everything below the navel is gone.

We looked at her stump. If that's what you call it. I don't think I will go into the details. But I keep thinking, if I am so traumatized by this, and I am in my twenties and fairly experienced at seeing things that most people don't look at, what if I was 12 and this was my mom? I can't even imagine. And I can't imagine something like that happening to me. I would rather die. There are some things worse than death. But I guess we all get to choose.