Patient Acting- OHSU

Yesterday I had the bad news case, which is the hardest case they have at the med school. Both for the students and for the actor. One student acts as the doctor and 4 students observe and one doctor grades them and they are first year medical students. The bad news case is where the student has to tell me that I have metastatic renal cancer and will die in six months. The first time I did this case, I was twirling a pencil wondering where I could find the emotions I would need when the student told me I had cancer and I snapped the pencil and said "what!". After that I've always broken a pencil when they first tell me. Students from past years remember me as the pencil guy. The grading doctor tells the students that they will have to do this scenario for real many times in their careers and it never gets easy. After the rollercoaster emotions of hearing that twelve times it was time to run.
Stopped at the Dunniway track at the bottom of the hill from the medical school and did 1 mile on the track and then took a path that led up to Terwilliger Blvd. which climbs up and up. In the picture, the road goes up the hill in the trees and continues up the next hill. It has a nice wide running path sidewalk all along it and on nice days it's full of runners. Nike sponsers weekly runs that start downtown and run up Terwilliger and back. Wednesday it was lightly raining, so only a few people besides me were running it. I went up about a mile and a half and turned around and came back down to the track and did one last mile for a total of 5.1 miles in 44:27 at an 8:43 pace which is good for a hill run.