My love for Student Health Services cannot be expressed with mere words...

The BBQ Pit
1

… because we’re not allowed to wish death on anyone here.

About 4AM Saturday morning, I wake up and notice that I feel like crap. I was sleeping on a friend’s floor without a pillow, though, so I figure “no big deal, I’ll go sleep in my own bed, take a hot shower, it’ll all calm down.” It doesn’t, but I was sleeping at a weird angle, that might have been the problem. No idea why it hurts to swallow so much, but it should go away eventually.

Saturday night, the same friend (who lives about 3/4 mile away, up a steep hill the whole way) wants me to come back up to his place for his birthday party. He’s been planning this for months, and he planned the date around my schedule, so I kinda gotta to go. He gives me some advil when he notices that I can barely stand up/I alternate between sweating like a pig & shivering while wearing three coats. Between that & being drunk enough that I couldn’t feel myself anyway, I’m alright by the end of the night. A person in his dormitory suite tries to start a fistfight with me, right in front of a cop, on the way out of the building, but nothing too horrible occurs.

And then, brushing my teeth Sunday morning, I notice that the toothpaste’s red when I spit it out. I look down my throat, and it’s white and green in the back, and I’m coughing up blood & mucous. Student Health Services is closed on Sundays, and my mother’s insurance card just expired, so I can’t go to one of the many hospitals around me. The hour it took to figure that out exhausted me, so I go back to sleep for about four hours, go to my DnD session, eat some soup (swallowing solid food really, really hurts right now), drink some orange juice, and go back to sleep. Total time awake that day- six hours.

I wake up today (monday), and wander down to student health again. I’m feeling much better than I was, but “feeling like crap” is still an understatment. My appointment comes, and they tell me to take off my coat, and refuse to listen to my protests. They take my temperature first thing, and… 92.1 F (about 33.3 C). I still can’t put my coat on, 'cause that would make it harder to check my pulse/lymph nodes. My heart beat is twice the usual, Blood pressure has gone from (tuesday)104/52 to 92/90, and I when I check every single box on the “symptoms” sheet, the doctor double-checks and tells me that it’s an understatment.

“I don’t have time to run any real tests on you, though,” he says. “Drink lots of fluids, get some rest, and buy some tylenol,” he says.

Uhh, gee, thanks doc! Like I wasn’t already doing all that?

After a little begging, he writes me a perscription for some painkillers-something to numb the throat. Still not helping much, but, hey, it’s better than the nothing he was trying to give me. “Come back in a week if you’re not better. If you schedule an appoinment now, I might have some time then.” Nevermind I don’t know if I’ll still be sick then, but hey, at least he’s offering to help if I can fit impossible circumstances.
My stupid fucker tolerance for one day is gone, so I’ll be waiting 'til tomorrow to pay for a second opinion at a real hospital. Back to sleep with me now.

2

Tell me about it. My student death services would swing wildly from one extreme in treatment to another. I would go in one time and get prescribed all sorts of antibiotics, even though I knew and repeatedly told them they would do nothing for my condition. Another time I went in and should have gotten antibiotics (as verified by a real doctor) (yea yea I know student death doctors are real doctors too, let it be) and they were not giving them out no way no how. Then there was the time the nurse on duty convinced me I was going to have a heart attack…grrrrr.

Of course my current experiences with real doctors have not been stellar either, so who’s to say?

3

Yep, same shit here. I’ve heard all sorts of horror stories first-hand: useless antibiotics, un-necessary painkillers, “Drink lots of fluids and take Tylenol” to people on their deathbeds with one infection or another. Most student health centers tend towards the understaffed, underfunded, and overwhelmed.

Wish I could offer something more than “hang in there,” but please, do so!

4

Student health doctors know that their patient population–young, healthy adults–consists of a hearty lot. Almost no matter what the doctor does, you’ll bounce back.

You don’t give your age but presumably it’s late teens/early twenties as would be expected for any student health population. The doctor treating you knows that, statistically, the likelihood of you suffering from a serious illness, requiring immediate medical intervention, is very low. That being said, the occasional “odd duck” does present to student health services. The hope is that these practitioners remain vigilant for life-threatening illness.

From the OP it is clear that you felt very crappy. In the treating physician’s mind, that is one part of the equation in determining the potential severity of your illness (and regardless of their determination of the overall severity, the right thing is to offer you treatments for the symptoms that are making you feel shitty). Another part is your past medical history (are you generally healthy?). Another is the physical exam and laboratory testing (though not all presentations warrant labs), Put it all together, and you have an idea of what intervention is necessary.

Apparently, for you, the combination of your history, subjective complaints, and objective findings did not trigger the doctor’s [red alert] Warning-severe illness [/red alert] alarm. Speaking as a doctor, it is not uncommon for the doctor to conclude that a patient is not less ill then they thought.

Nevertheless, the OP did mention several details that, if accurate-though I think they’re not, see below-would push this presentation into my serious illness category.

Were the reported temperature accurate, it represents serious hypothermia and IMHO, requires hospitalization for acute management and investigation of an underlying cause. However, I wouldn’t expect you to walk into the clinic, but be carried in instead. Likewise, the reported doubling of the pulse rate. If average is about 75 or so, then you’d be talking about 150. Let me tell you, if I advised somebody with these two findings to just go home and take extra fluids, that would get my heart rate up.

So I’m hoping that you misstated these findings a bit. IMHO, further evidence that you might not be seriously ill comes from your description of the weekend’s activities. You sound like a good friend and all but if you were really, really, really sick, on death’s door, you probably don’t walk the 3/4 mile to party with your pal Saturday night.

Hope that by the time this reaches you, you’re feeling better. Me, I kept myself home from work today with a runny nose and a very sore throat. I’m taking extra fluids and occasional ibuprofen.

Choosy MD

5

The sicker I am, the more likely I am to walk long distances/drive long distances to do things that if I were a little bit better, I’d be less likely to do. I walked five miles in a snowstorm to pick up a paperback one time I was home sick with pneumonia.

Still, those numbers don’t sound right.

6

My college had some of the most incompetent doctors. Most of them were normal, if a bit dismissive. Some were great. But everyone I knew, and one time or another, had a bad experience there. Mine involved them continuing to prescribe 3-day doses of antibiotics for a recuring UTI that eventually grew completely resistant to the drugs.

The best tale, though, comes from a girl on my dorm floor, who went to the health center complaining of the stomach flu and intestinal cramps. She returned, an hour later, telling us the doctor had barely glanced at her, given her a lecture about her diet, and told her to take motrin. We put her to bed with a bucket.

When we got back to dinner, her roommate came to tell us she was really sick, very warm, and her stomach really hurts, especially if you touch it. Health services, at this point, was closed, so my neighbor calls her mom, who’s a nurse. Mom says go to the hospital right now.

Do the vast majority of the students who come in with those symptoms just have gastroentoritis? Yeah. Are most of the rest faking and looking for a note out of class? Yeah. None of that means the girl down the hall DIDN’T have appendecitis, and didn’t warrant a full exam.

My problem biggest problem with the health centers is that they seem to get the attitude that, statisticaly, it’s highly unlikely you’re really sick, therefore you’re either exagerating or faking. And the more you come back, the more dismissive they get. I’ve known people with all kinds of crazy things-- including pneumonia-- that were caught by outside second opinions, docs back home one break, or trips to the ER, after being missed by the health center. I got myself one ugly kidney infection thanks to them.

7

Maybe I’m just lucky, but the Student Health people at UT (Tennessee) were never anything less than professional. I was really not feeling well a time or two, and once sprained my ankle badly. They really helped and even thought I saw 3-4 over the years, they were all top-quality about it.

8

I went to the student health center at Florida State last August after spending the weekend sicker than I’ve ever been in my life. I was yellow, I couldn’t sleep, and I couldn’t stop puking. They took my temperature, asked me what was the trouble, and all that, then not only didn’t diagnose me as being sick, they wouldn’t excuse me from that morning’s classes.

So I went to all my classes that day, and went to the doctor that night. So, doctor, am I sick? Am I risk to anybody around me, like, say, a classroom full of college kids who are forced to sit there while I cough and sweat and snot all over the place? Ah, hepatitis. Well, good thing that’s not contagious.

9

My roommate’s pre-med with a few nifty toys, and he didn’t think I’d be alive with a temp of 92.1, so he re-took my temp after I woke up. I’m still pretty bad (a bit below 95, I’m usually low 98’s) after a few hours nap, but no longer on death’s door. I’m still going to check in with a doctor who has time for me first thing tomorrow morning.

As to the friend’s party… he delayed it a week, on two weeks notice, after having scheduled it two months in advance, specifically so that I could be there. It’d be a dickish thing to do to your best friend to make him reschedule and then not go, and Dearest Mother Dear raised me up to be grateful. I had to stop and rest every three minutes, it ended up taking me about 45 to get there, and I called him before the final chunk of stairs to have him carry me the rest of the way, but no way in Hell was I going to miss it.

On the bright side, I now have an excuse to take the elevator to the third floor of a 19-story dormitory.

10

As much as I hate to double-post, a somewhat paranoid thought just occured to me. They might have known their equipment was reading low. They might knowingly be using faulty equipment. This would explain why I’m not in a hospital right now, but still isn’t exactly a point in their favor.

Or my tongue’s circulation might just not be up to par. I’ll acknowledge that possibility, just to be fair.

11

My former alma mater used a three-tier classification system to determine what’s wrong with you.

If you’re female, you’re pregnant.
If you’re gay, you have an STD.
Otherwise, you’re hung over.

On rare occasions, females and homosexuals may be hung over, so you have to be sure not to miss those tricky cases.

12

I have to say, the Student Health folks at SUNY / Old Westbury were quite good. They listened well and provided some form of intervention when appropriate.

13

Bah. You actually have a doctor on campus. My school is apparently too small to warrent that, so we get a nurse who’s a wonderfully sweet person, and completely incompetant when it comes to medicine. She can write perscriptions, but if someone’s actually injured or sick, she just sends you to the urgent-care clinic in town, where you get to sit and wait and stew in others’ misery for six hours before seeing the nurse. Then after those six hours of joy you get thirty-five seconds with an overworked nurse and they give you the exact SAME diagnosis you made yourself and give you the exact same method of treatment that you told the nurse you needed WHEN YOU FIRST HURT YOURSELF TWO DAYS AGO!!

Not that I’m bitter, or anything. grumble grumble

14

Wow that fever musta really fucked up your memory. Any one of these would cause you to be as has been said, carried out.
A pulse pressure of 2mmHg?

15

He’s either dead or misremembering.

16

I had an mild allergic reaction to an allergy medication. It caused my throat to feel constricted, it was hard to swallow, breathe through my mouth (I was very congested) and my mouth felt drier than the Sahara even after trying everything to make it not feel dry.
I went to the student heath clinic first thing in the morning. The doctor told me I was a hypochondriac having an anxiety attack & wasting his time, handed me a sample bottle of Zoloft and sent me away. The condition persisted for days until the medication I had taken worked itself out of my system… I never took the Zoloft.

17

Ooh, I’ve got a student health story!

A friend in the dorms was having headaches and seizures, and she found a lump behind her ear. She went to student health after she fell and hit her head during a seizure and they diagnosed her with…
wait for it…
depression. The prescription? Birth control pills.

Her mother found out about the lump and took her to a neurologist. Seems that she had a hole in her skull and her brain had herniated through it, causing this lump of brain tissue to be squeezed by her broken skull. She had emergency surgery and they removed a large portion of her temporal lobe.

I still think she should’ve raised a stink with SH about the shitty diagnosis.

18

I went to student health services twice. Once to get on the pill. The doc really wanted me to start on Depo Provera. I’d heard a couple of horror stories about it from people who’d had the shot and I wanted to talk through possible side-effects, and what percentage of the population taking it were likely to experience them. The doc said “Well, no one I’ve ever given it to complained.” This was not all that reassuring, particularly given her brusque bedside manner. I don’t think I’d go back and complain to her either!

The second time I was having a bit of a panic over a mole that had changed size and appearance. I’m very fair, I’ve had my share of childhood sunburns, it’s pretty much a given that at some point I’ll need moles removed.

She laughed at me. Told me it was fine and sent me on my way within 5 minutes. I know she was busy but that’d be, I dunno, a fine time to suggest I get a full skin cancer screening.

I am terrified of skin cancer so that really didn’t help. And the dermatologist who screened me this year told me that was one of the moles he wanted me to watch. I still harbour ill feelings toward the student health doctor.

19

… Filmgeek, I think that story wins.

20

I had my first gyn exam at my college clinic.

TMI to follow:
The nurse practioner apparently had difficulties visualizing my cervix. She was down there poking about and making comments like “that’s weird.” She endedup telling me that my cervix was abnormally placed and that I might not be able to have children secondary to that. Of course while all this is going on, another nurse opened up the exam room door to show the exam room to a person interviewing for a job without knocking or asking to come in.

I learned later, of course, that my cervix is quite normal, thank you.