BUG CURES STROKE

During medical school, I had a clinical rotation at the old Veterans Hospital in Washington, DC, in the 1960s. It was initially a private girl's school built-in 1930 that had been converted to a Veterans Hospital after World War Two. Its structural design didn't change very much when it became a hospital. The dormitory rooms became patient rooms with minimal changes. There was no air conditioning, and in the summer, it was hot and sticky. On Friday nights, many of the week's patients were discharged, and many vacated hospital beds were available. One evening on a sweltering summer night, I was assigned a newly admitted patient to evaluate. During summer, weekends usually presented with a surge of homeless veterans in the emergency room, recovering from a week of inadequate nutrition and the overconsumption of cheap alcohol.

My patient, a middle-aged male, admitted from the ER with a stroke diagnosis, was unresponsive to verbal and physical stimuli. He lay in bed with his eyes shut, unable to give a history of his illness. He was breathing comfortably, and vital signs were normal, but his extremities were flaccid. They fell to his side when lifted and released; however, all his reflexes were brisk and healthy when checked with a reflex hammer. Writing in his chart, next to the bed adjacent to an opened window, a sudden strange fluttering sound was occurring behind me. As I stepped away, a giant brown cockroach about the size of a baseball landed on his bare abdomen. His eyes immediately opened wide. His back arched upward off the bed, seeming to levitate as he rose upwards to jump out of bed, running out the room. I ran after him shouting for him to stop so I could finish my examination, but he escaped down a stairwell, and I lost sight of him. Embarrassed, I had to report that the exam was incomplete because a roach seemed to have cured a stroke, and I lost the patient. Later that evening, the intern informed me that security had found him and instructed me to finish my examination. He hadn't had a stroke, but he remained a guest of the hospital over the weekend. Admitting the homeless on weekends to feed, bathe, and dry them out (detox) was a service to the community and a way to keep medical students on their toes. I doubt that there are any therapeutic roaches curing strokes these days in our modern VA system.