Wed give her antibiotics and wait her out, I figured. Each day, she stayed more or less the same. I checked her vital signs, listened to her lungs, looked up her labs. I went to see her twice each day for the next several days. I took sputum and blood cultures and, following the internists instructions, started her on an antibiotic for this possible pneumonia. So her internist admitted her to the hospital, and now she was under my care. A chest X-ray showed a possible pneumoniamaybe it was, maybe it wasnt. But some laboratory tests revealed her white blood cell count was abnormally high. One was a wrinkled, seventy-something-year-old Portuguese woman who had been admitted becauseIll use the technical term hereshe didnt feel too good. The senior resident had assigned me primary responsibility for three or four patients. I was on an internal medicine rotation, my last rotation before graduating. Several years ago, in my final year of medical school, I took care of a patient who has stuck in my mind.
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