How is your love life as a medical student / intern / resident / practicing phys

[Argirios Argiriou]

How is your love life as a medical student / intern / resident / practicing physician like?
From: Amy Chai, MD, Internal Medicine, MS Epidemiology.

I will answer your question with an amusing anecdote:

I was a medical student doing my work in the university medical clinic when a female patient came in. I recognized her, she was the wife of a resident physician. Her complaint was “infertility.” She had been trying to conceive for a couple of years with no luck. In medicine, one year of failure to conceive is considered “infertility.”

I had a choice. I could order all the expensive fertility tests, or I could ask that extremely awkward question. I did ask it. I asked how often she had relations with her spouse (I suspected not often). She said “once a month, sometimes twice” and mind you she was a gorgeous and well dressed young bride. (Not a haggard, unkempt, bare-faced and exhausted medical student like myself). I asked if she “knew about ovulation” and then proceeded to explain about the “fertile time of the month” and also about the magical “ovulation predictors” and then I suggested that she “get an ovulation prediction kit from CVS and then when it turns blue, STAT page the husband and ask him to come home for five minutes—okay make it ten.” She did this, and we saved the healthcare system thousands of dollars worth of unnecessary medical evaluation. The cold hard truth is that ya can’t get pregnant without sex unless you are a venerated religious figure.

If I did not know that she was married to a surgical resident, I would not have made the correct diagnosis. Always ask.

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