The first patient

Gone are the student days, the times of intense studies, simple academic worries - how to get time to find out more about what is taught immensely and with a great complexity? Where  could one find a cheaper dining room to fill an unspoilt stomach with not very refined food, only to  later feel in half an hour that you are hungry again. Where to spend a bit of free time that a student has after studying? Where can you earn extra money to add a small amount to your student scholarship and parents' money being sent?

Now the worries have changed somewhat, you are paid as a doctor, you are already studying in your chosen field and you are already trusted to treat patients. This is already much more interesting than a bare theoretic medicine study. Here you learn and practice at the same time, and this is called an internship.
Interns take tests every week for a certain disease, and I always had everything with this, good grace!

One of my favorite activities is spending time at the library, behind a stack of books, in which at least a dozen are monographs. I love to understand the complexities of mental pathology and how to treat it.

Silence, twilight, table lamps that illuminate books and your notebook while you write out grains of knowledge into it. Looking around, you see the same students writing essays, preparing for tests or exams, all this creates a kind of magical atmosphere in the temple of knowledge, which is a library.
Usually the schedule of the intern is as follows: in the morning you go to the hospital in your department, where you were assigned to practice, where you were entrusted with one or two patients whom you are treating.

Then at lunchtime we are gathered by the associate professor of the department or the head of practice, the head of department number one, with whom the department works closely. (Ward number one is the base of the Department of Psychiatry.). Usually one of our lecturers first conducts a survey, then reads new material and gives new tasks that all interns must complete. This seems to be nothing special, except that you have already been entrusted with someone's health and fate. I don't know how the rest of the interns felt about their work, but that's how I understood and felt.

The boy was diagnosed with ''schizophrenia. Hallucinatory paranoid form. " He was taller than average height, angular, thin. He did not communicate with anyone, was in constant motion, whispered something quietly to himself, smiled absurdly and grimaced. His increased physical activity could suddenly be interrupted, and then my patient could freeze for a few minutes, listening to something. Unfortunately, I cannot say in detail what delusional ideas he expressed, since this did not hold my memory, I only know that these were ideas of external influence on his body and psyche. But I remember well the experiences of his mother, with whom he was the only and talented son. The boy studied very well before the disease and played music successfully.

Unfortunately, their happy life was interrupted by the flu which proceeded with a high fever and after the boy was ill, after a few weeks, the wrong behavior appeared. The boy completely ceased to be interested in study, stopped going to school, he would often leave home at night and wander somewhere, returning in the morning.
It was this behavior that served as the reason for hospitalization in a psychiatric hospital.
For some time the patient was led by a psychiatrist of the department for about fifty-five years, who handed over the patient to me.
Having familiarized myself with the state of the patient's psyche, his behavior and the method of previous treatment, I came to the conclusion that the treatment was not active enough, the doses of prescribed medicine and the  preparations themselves were not selected appropriately.

But before changing anything, I decided to first familiarize myself with a new way of treating similar conditions. After studying the "fresh" literature, I decided to prescribe drugs not in pills, which do not work as quickly as I would like. With such an acute mental state, the best way to treat a patient is to prescribe a powerful antipsychotic agent and, necessarily, intramuscularly, for its quick delivery to the sick nervous system. The choice fell on the drug majeptil.
After a week of treatment with majeptil, noticeable changes appeared in the patient's mental state. The degree of mental stress and psychomotor activity decreased (the patient moved less in the department), became more communicative with others.He stopped listening to all the sounds around him and grimacing. After another week, I allowed him to go home on Saturday and Sunday.

On one of the days of visits, the patient's mother came to me and told me the news that she had agreed with the head physician to transfer her son to another department. This department turned out to be department number one and the doctor who would lead the patient turned out to be the head of our practice. She motivated this translation with a calmer atmosphere that was in that department and that the son would be led by a more experienced doctor. I had no choice but to write a pre-transfer epicrisis and ask the orderly to send the patient to another department.

About two weeks later, the patient's mother came to me and asked me to come to ward number one and take over the treatment of her son, as it turned out that all my appointments were changed and other medications were prescribed and her son got worse, almost completely rolling back to his former state. Unfortunately, I could not do this, since I was not the head of the department, especially since the patient was under treatment by the other specialist, and no one had the right to interfere with his appointment.

Over time, I was transferred to another department and knew nothing more about the fate of my first patient.