Showing posts with label San Francisco General Hospital. Show all posts
Showing posts with label San Francisco General Hospital. Show all posts

2009/09/29

medicine's blind spots

When I was hospitalized with a MRSA infection, I was seeing doctors and other health specialists, not counting the ward nurses, literally by the dozen. I needed surgery on my foot to clear out an infection there, and my lungs were also infected, showing “cavitary lesions” (basically holes, which for the most part filled in again after treatment). It was not clear at first that the infections were the same, since the necessary intervening pathways—the blood and the heart—showed no infection by the time the lung damage was found. So I was talking to orthopedic surgeons, cardio and infectious specialists, pulmonologists, practitioners from my primary care team, and doubtless others I can’t remember; San Francisco General Hospital seemed to stint no resources in a multidisciplinary approach to figuring out what was wrong with me and how to fix it.
Among all these doctors, one stands out: Dr. X checked in with me regularly, often several times a day. He made sure I was getting all the information that I needed from the various teams. He explained how the thinking of the teams was progressing, where there was consensus and where uncertainty. Uniquely among the doctors, he repeatedly encouraged me