Sketchy Medical Videos -

The next morning on rounds, a patient presented with profuse, watery diarrhea post-antibiotics. The attending physician, a stern woman named Dr. Calhoun who had apparently been carved from a glacier, turned to Leo. “What’s your differential?”

Then Leo saw it. He wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at the pattern of her twitching fingers. It was a dance. A jerky, uncoordinated, wrong dance. Sketchy Medical Videos

The sketch showed a sweating, trembling guitar player on a stage made of blankets. A fan was blowing directly on him. And in the corner, a pill bottle labeled “SSRI” was on fire. The next morning on rounds, a patient presented

The sketch showed a beautiful, faceless marionette. Her strings were cut. Her limbs were limp. But then, a shadowy figure with a doctor’s stethoscope was tying new strings —strings made of orange ribbons labeled “NMDA.” The voiceover whispered, “The ovaries whisper a secret tumor. The puppet doesn’t know her own hands. She writes love letters to no one. She dances without music. And the psych ward is where she goes to die… unless you find the teratoma.” “What’s your differential

Leo’s mind was a blank slate of terror. Then, unbidden, the image of the angry purple bacterium with a crown floated into his head. He heard the silly voice: The King demands his watery tribute.

“Clostridium difficile,” Leo said. Then, because his brain-to-mouth filter was destroyed by exhaustion, he added, “And he doesn’t like vancomycin.”

They called it “conversion disorder.” A psychiatric problem. “Nothing organic,” the chief resident said, sighing. “Transfer her to psych.”