Intern Year

The saddest thing I saw intern year--and have no doubt, it was a year of fresh horrors--was when one of my patients drank her gravy like she was a dog lapping at a pool of water. She had right-sided heart failure and to "fix" her, we were giving her high doses of diuretics in an effort to help her pee out the extra fluid accumulating in her legs and stomach. Of course, the side effect of this medication was that the salt level in her blood kept increasing, triggering the thirst receptors in her brain. To make things worse, we had limited the amount of fluid she could drink in a day to just 500 mL, the equivalent of one measly Poland Spring water bottle. She was like Tantalus of the Greek mythology--tantalized by a pool of water, only to find it just out of reach.