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    Yu Get Jook! Diaries of a Jamaican Medic
    Yu Get Jook! Diaries of a Jamaican Medic
    Yu Get Jook! Diaries of a Jamaican Medic
    Ebook151 pages3 hours

    Yu Get Jook! Diaries of a Jamaican Medic

    By Susan Lowe

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    About this ebook

    This is not Jamaica ER of the UK's Channel 4. It's a kinder, more respectful & less invasive self expose of a Jamaican doctor's journey into and through medicine. Maybe a milder, Jamaican, version of Blood, Sweat & Tea. Even so, it is no less eye opening, even shocking, & can be funny as all...well....read it.

    This book is for all those who have trod the road of what is considered standard western medicine ... where we make ourselves ill in school to learn to cure the sick...:)

    “...Shocking though, as well as funny & educational...the thing that really interested me was the homoeopathic advice...”
    - Mercedes Gilkes, Sales Channel Mgr. (ret), Intermec, UK

    “Dr. Lowe captures the deeper lessons taught and learnt about fitting in and being true to oneself ... & de bobol doan pass er eider!. (confusion & nonsense doesn’t pass her either)"
    - Francis Pierre, (former) Acting Technical Head, Blood Bank, EWMSC, Trinidad

    “Interesting...” (what else could this hero say ...)
    - EA, high up, Ministry of Health, Jamaica

    “They broke the mold...”
    - Ron DQ, U Hospital WI ‘Knifeman’ (ret), Jamaica

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSusan Lowe
    Release dateMar 25, 2013
    ISBN9781301008780
    Yu Get Jook! Diaries of a Jamaican Medic
    Author

    Susan Lowe

    Integrative General Practitioner, Transformational Coach & Counsellor. Danced 34 years including semi-professional work. You can also find me at http://pinterest.com/onlinejam Publisher of: YU GET JOOK! Diaries of a Jamaican Medic. THE BROWN PHOENIX: An Erotic Dialogue from The Indies SHUB DOWN & SMALL-UP YUSELF! Diaries of Jamaica by Bus Printed books also available at Novelty Trading Co., Jamaica novtraco@cwjamaica.com Printer's Seconds: http://www.onlinecounsellingjamaica.com/jamaica-50-reduced-book-offer/

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    • 5/5
      Hilarious and completely believable chronicle of 'casualty' the Jamaican emergency room.

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    Yu Get Jook! Diaries of a Jamaican Medic - Susan Lowe

    This book covers years as a senior student, junior & senior house officer. It is entirely personal and does not imply agreement with anyone else’s views, but neither does it imply disagreement. Names, places and chronology have been changed to protect the guilty, the innocent and the suspect.

    Read this paragraph if you feel ‘academic’. According to Malcolm Gladwell, - who has recently been exploring his ½ Jamaicaness – in studying Hofstede’s research, he found that Jamaica, interestingly and second only to Singapore, has one of the highest ‘tolerances of ambiguity’. You won’t fail to see this quod erat demonstrat in these pages  so the implied choice of correct leadership style for Jamaica will also not fail to suggest itself. While our medics are some of the world’s best in many cases - some even attendant on visiting heads of state as designated by the visiting government, based on reputation, recommendation and credentials – we apparently rarely see these people as integral to the role of maintaining our public plant and they equally as rarely see themselves so … with some exceptions…

    He is the best physician who knows the worthlessness of his own medicine.

    - Professor W. M. Osler, Professor of Medicine, Oxford University.

    A drug is that substance which, when injected into a rat, will produce a scientific report - author unknown

    The Hippocratic Oath

    In Patient

    The Steinmann Pin

    The Black & Decker drill whirred to life in the good strong hand of our orthopaedic registrar and I looked heavenward. So now we were supposed to fix patient trolleys as well...? Yeah, it was rickety and the wheels had screeched down the hall but the guy was lying comfortably with his tell-tale turned out leg (broken hip) and the trolley wasn’t teetering precariously as many did so what gave?

    Where’s our drill? I asked the other student.

    See it here, answered the registrar. We students looked at each other… I mean the bone drill, the hand one…

    No man, we use this, they mash up the other one.

    Was this guy joking? Well, we discovered he wasn’t because he picked up the Steinmann bit and fixed it to the adapted Black and Decker head. You see, what we’d been taught was, you have to drill bone slowly so as not to burn it. Electric carpentry drills revolve fast enough to burn bone and hand-cranked drills revolve at a safe speed … but they’re more delicate and get mashed up easily in poorly maintained high use inner city emergency rooms. The trick with the hardy Black and Decker was to give short bursts and stop so as not to burn the bone.

    Practise, said our affable registrar. We practised. ZZZtt, ZZZtt, ZZZtt. The male student was handier at it than I was, though I knew my way around a drill too… I’d let him go first.

    Now, look here, you guys have to put the lidocaine right down to the bone and into it on both sides of the leg; you have to feel the needle buck the bone and push again or it nuh have nuh use. Periosteum (bone covering) feels a lot of pain so you have to do it deep down, into the bone covering.

    The patient was observing and listening interestedly. We stuck the man just below both sides of his right kneecap, right down into the bone; ‘Scratch, scratch’; the needle nicked the bone nicely, then more.

    There was sharply in drawn breath by the patient as the needle found its mark.

    Doan worry, soon done, we reassured, You soon won’t feel anything.

    Sure enough, within seconds the patient was back to his comfortable, interested self. Our registrar was also very good at vocal anaesthesia … nothing like reassurance from the boss.

    Just wait a little let it work good, said the competent fellow. We waited.

    Pain killing is an art in medicine and the pain that patients feel consists of 2 major components, what he thinks he feels and what the nerve registers electrically when measured. You give painkillers according to what the patient thinks he feels, without OD-ing him of course. We knew our guy was no hysteric from the moment we met him, always a big help to an orthopaedic student.

    Awright now, who going first?

    My colleague reached a little less certainly for the Black and Decker than we had the regular bone drill. ZZZtt, ZZZtt, ZZZtt, my friend got ready to take the plunge.

    Before we go on, let me explain a little about the Steinmann Pin. It’s used to create traction on a broken thigh bone and hip so that the muscles of the thigh don’t shorten before the operation and to help ease pain along with analgesics. We run it horizontally through the top of the biggest leg bone just below the knee and then straps and weights are used to draw on the leg. It’s not bloody at all. Before you drill you have to have made little cross-shaped cuts where you push the pin in to prevent unnecessary traction on the skin and tenting out the other side … all of which helps with pain and trauma reduction. Entry of the pin is always from the outside of the leg to the inside so you can avoid the big leg nerves that, if injured, would cause a kind of foot drop.

    ZZZtt, ZZZtt, ZZZtt, something wasn’t right. The skin was twisting around the Steinmann like a mini hurricane. Andrew stopped…our registrar took a look.

    Go on again, he said.

    Andrew tried again but no dice. He withdrew. The patient had been lying back, calmly watching the proceedings, hands laced behind his head exactly as you might expect someone would be on a chaise longue, on a beautiful tropical January day ... because that’s exactly what it was outside this main public hospital, in this gorgeous little country. What, for the life of me, we were doing inside and not at the beach I really couldn’t say. Curing the sick ... hhmmmm…

    Drill head waan tighten.

    Eh? All looked, a bit blankly, at the patient.

    Me say de drill head waan to tighten. An absolutely matter of fact statement.

    I think him right. This is how you know a good registrar … or practitioner of any kind … can still be taught. I had always felt confident being with this registrar guy … he had a kind of DWSH (developing world surgical hospital) background.

    The registrar duly tightened the tool head and handed it back to Andrew. ZZZtt…, off we went, problem solved. Half way through the bone … me next… I continued out the other side … YESSSS! … no tenting of the skin, broke the surface on the opposite side of the leg, detached the pin from the drill and kept going with a good, strong, slow, twisting motion of the hand. The patient nodded his approval. Non-histrionic or not, it was clear our resident had instructed us very well regarding topical anaesthesia of a patient and I took the lesson away with me … even more so than how to insert a Steinmann pin … not to mention how to use a handy alternative to the bone drill in case of mass disaster.

    Jamaican Pain

    …And you think this is funny? Jamaica is a socially split country and I’m telling you, 80% of us have a pain culture different to the 20% raised in a more Eurocentric fashion … and if you check out ethno-cultural geographers, you’ll find ethnic differences in pain culture all over the world. Depending on where and how you are raised, you experience and understand pain with subjective differences in perception.

    In Jamaica, the injection needle is a good standard by which to judge all pain. It gives the real value of the alertness and orientation rating as assessed via the Glasgow Coma Score (GCS) and it is also a very good standard re malingering. Such is the fear of needles (not sure I know any scientific word for this phobia) that if a patient says he wants a jook instead of oral medications, you know the pain is dire - never mind pain perception scales. If the patient is in a ‘dead faint’ and the reviving adrenalin or other medication is presented in a needle and the patient instantly flies to a GCS 15 (highest level of alertness and consciousness) you know what’s up. The terror of needles here means there will never be an IV drug use problem in Jamaica. Not to worry, there are plenty

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