So today we started head and neck. It's exciting because it's the last unit of anatomy and then I am done with the torture. In just 3 short weeks I will go from having class 6-8 hours a day to only having 4 each day and being done at noon. Yeah, life is going to get a lot simpler except for the random 6 foot Filipino that will suddenly show up around the same time and start eating all my food. Seriously, who brings someone a piece of their own mother's homemade pie and then eats all of it but the crust. It was MY mother who made the pie and that was MY only slice! I believe you even went back to her house and ate more pie there. All I have to say is that sometimes violence is the answer and in cases of stolen pie there really is no other way to resolve the issue. Crust doesn't count as saving me some so watch your back! You know who you are. And drinking my milk until there is barely a cup left doesn't help your case either.
So today we learned that our professor won a beard off in 1968. He is pretty impressive. We also got to watch our beloved upper classmen (emphasis on MEN) come into our lecture hall in obscenely short skirts and tight shirts stuffed with balloons and give us quite the little cheer. They had booty shaking and high kicks (those were not pretty due to the previously mentioned shortness of the skirts) and a nice little chant about how they think they can beat our class at anything. Today they were confident they would win the powderpuff game. I am totally not joking when I say medical school is just like highschool. We really have powderpuff football. We also had a game called sloshball a few weekends ago which is just kickball modified to include kegs of beer, costumes, and a slip-n-slide. So anyway, I am not playing the game, but based on previous athletic encounters between the classes I would consider us the varsity squad and them the JV. It's like we scrimmage them to boost our confidence and perfect our game plans for the real competitors. That was a little mean. But it is exactly the sort of thing a high school student would say and since I am trying to make that comparison I am going to keep acting this way. Actually, I think medical school is exactly what kids want high school to be and at the same time the exact opposite of what they wish high school would be. You can walk out whenever you want, class is completely optional, the professors laugh when you tease them, you have a keycard for every door in every building, hook-ups are almost a mandatory part of study sessions (this is why I study alone), when you get a test you can go anywhere on campus you want to take it, you can talk to your classmates in the hall during the test if you want (not about the test), there is a free lunch every day if you just go find it, and there is no social structure that makes upper classmen look down on you your first year. In fact, they just feel bad for you so they are helpful and nice. I think it is not what students want because studying 4-8 hours a day is common, getting below a 70% is failing, you are too busy to try and look nice, and having a social life at all outside of school is almost impossible. Oh, and no one wants to hear you whine so shut-up, sit down, and study.
I had my cancer research elective today. Cancer is awesome in a study it kind of way, but not in a have it kind of way. I'm pretty excited to hear about the possible causes, cures, and pathologies. I also got an email about my third and last elective. It's in a detox clinic in Denver. The elective intro email specifically told us to have wash and wear clothes because we will get body fluids, lice, scabies, and the like on us. It also asked us to report to the nurse if we get assaulted by a belligerent patient so they can call the police. Ah, the life of a physician. When I was a young girl I remember waking up one day and realising I didn't care about getting a job where I could help people or make a difference. I just wanted a job where there was a good chance I would get vomited on multiple times a week. Okay, that is completely not true. I just feel like medicine has been romanticized into this nice profession where you help people and they get better. Really you just have unpleasant things happen to you all the time and you are never allowed to get upset except in private or the patient who probably upset you in the first place will sue you. I also think being a physician is odd because people will just take off any of their clothing if you request it. And say anything you want if you have your stethoscope on their back. So back to the main point. I did not come here to get lice, scabies, and bodily fluids all over my person, but I suppose it comes with the territory.
We also had an extensive lecture on professionalism. I really enjoy hearing about how everything is a professionalism violation. Since everything is a violation and it makes me depressed to think of all these new lifelong rules, I have decided to whimsically think of a professionalism violations as instances where a professional has been violated. It makes me laugh when I think about it. In fact, I think if patients can sue us for a professionalism violation we should be allowed to sue them for violating us as professionals by getting their bodily fluids on us. Enough said. So today in You Can't Do Anything Without Being in Violation 101 we learned that being friends on facebook with anyone who you could possibly see in a clinical setting is a violation. So now I have to stop being friends with anyone who has ever been to see a doctor ever unless they are also a doctor. This is how they force us to make friends within the profession. Okay, that isn't quite the story. They told us we can't ever add anyone as a friend who we have seen in a clinical setting first. If we are friends before we just have to let someone else treat them unless there are extenuating circumstances and no one else is available. We also learned that hilarious cases are not okay to just talk about unless the details have been so removed and altered that you could never tell who the patient was even in a line-up. Like the person who had slowly developed liver disease without any reason and they eventually found out it was because their spouse had been poisoning their food for years. They figured it out because one day they gave the leftovers to their pet who promptly died. I can't believe these things happen and we have been banned from discussing them! That is a great story. Like in a movie kind of story. But it is hush-hush. I can tell you about this case because it was a long time ago and I didn't give out any details. Then we talked about how you need to help out fellow students if they get dumped and depressed by fiding them a new person to date. In the wise words of one of my classmates, "Nothing gets you over the last one like the new one." Unless of course the new one eats the only slice of pie you have from your own mother. No I will not let it go! I also learned that we eventually get trained on how to tactfully discourage patients who hit on us. I didn't think that actually happened, but apparantely it's pretty common. Like happens multiple times a week common. They also gave us tips for how to use our profession to get out of jury duty. Take that legal system that claims it treats everyone the same! Except then they told us it was a professionalism violation to do so.
So as an update on the hula hoop exercises. I skipped them the day before the test because I was studying and I have observed no marked improvement in my toned-ness. But I still persevere because otherwise I would get no exercise at all.
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