The One Sentence Summary

Leighton Schreyer, 2T6 Fitz

I failed the first Case Report I had to write in medical school—although, I guess I didn’t fail per se (it’s pretty hard to actually fail something); rather, my report was deemed inadequate, which, according to the rubric, meant that there was either information missing (highly unlikely, given that my report was 6 pages long and took me 2 hours to write despite my tutor saying it shouldn’t take longer than 20 minutes), or that information had been described inappropriately, which was more likely the case because, although it wasn’t explicitly stated (most things aren’t these days), the feedback I received was to try to make the summary more brief, and, while I thought I’d been relatively succinct in my half-page summary of patient KB who came to the ER the previous week complaining of SOB and was diagnosed with PE following CT, then coded despite being started on UFH, at which point they were sent to the ICU where an IVC filter was later placed, and although I had only alluded to some of the social factors at play—that they had fractured their foot, for example, while they were on vacation in the Philippines a few weeks before, which meant that they hadn’t been able to go to Zumba class or frequent the Farmer’s Market the way they normally did on Friday mornings to buy fresh fruits and vegetables and fine cut meats (which also meant they’d been eating more processed foods lately that were high in sugar and salt and saturated fat); or that they had talked about being lonely, which I knew posed health risks as deadly as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day—I still accepted the criticism and, when it came time to write the second Case Report, this time about patient CU, I limited my summary to a third of the page, which I thought was pretty brief but, again, my summary was deemed inadequate: challenge yourself, for the next case report, to make the summary just 2-3 sentences, the comments read this time, which made me think of Chuck, my Grade 12 English teacher, who passionately recited Shakespearean soliloquies each class and somehow found a way to make grammar lessons fun, encouraging us to apply our learning of punctuation—of em dashes and en dashes and commas and colons and parentheses and periods— by starting a class competition around who could write the longest, grammatically correct sentence (brownie points and bragging rights for the win), so when my tutor challenged me to write a summary in just 2-3 sentences (a suggestion that was surely meant to shorten my summary), I scoffed, defiant, and accepted the challenge, submitting my third Case Report with just a one sentence summary.