From Patient to Proctor

Anytime you make a fool of yourself, you are bound to relive its horror until the end of time. For most of us, our first encounter with a patient, even a standardized patient, is awkward to say the least. Whether you laughed out loud when you heard the word "impotence," or you tried to keep a serious face when the answer to your question "What brings you in today?" was "My neighbor Sheila's car," you gained a memory that cannot be erased. I can still vividly remember my first patient interview from last year. I pompously thought asking a few questions will be easy. When I actually sat down for my interview in front of my peers, my voice went several octaves higher than my normal speaking voice, and I used the clever phrase "um" several times in a row.

I've gotten much better at interviewing patients and consciously lowering my voice to a mature alto. Despite my improvement, I'm still new enough at the task that I easily get nervous and speak in my high pitched little girl voice. Although we're looking at these interviews as real-life practice, our standardized patients are just playing a role. They are terribly good at their jobs, and when one tells you, "I'm having problems pleasing my wife in bed," you believe him. We're not living in a big city, and since our standardized patients are picked from the staff and community around us, we inevitably encounter them in our real life.

Student often comment on the Nazi-like rule over our testing. Those who arrive 15 minutes early get lectured about the importance of being on time, while those who arrive one minute before the test must wait in the back to be checked in before starting. In the stress of awaiting our exams, I'm not sure if anybody notices that most of our test proctors are also our standardized patients. They are all there: the alcoholic church lady, the impotent chemist, and the raving old woman who would grease her legs with something called elephant ears (?!?). I know that these proctors were just playing a role, but I can't really get my first memory of them out of my mind. Although I'm always going to look at them as the raving impotent alcoholics, I wonder if they remember their interviewers and look at me as the med student with the sing-song little girl voice. They never show judgment when I'm in the room, nervous about my own skills, for which I am grateful, so I try my best not to judge them for the roles they are assigned to play. Though now that we actually have to touch these standardized patients to practice physical exams, I hope they use somebody other than our proctors. Otherwise, before tests instead of focusing on the facts I have to remember, when I receive my scantron I will be thinking, "It's the heroine addict with a hairy mole on his back... gross."

--By Farrah, who now wants to name her band My Square Heart so it can go on bumper stickers as "MY[ ]<3"