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| Top Ten Worst Medical School Experiences (10-4) by Bill Dungsroman 07/21/2003, 4:33pm PDT | ||||
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| Top Ten Worst Medical School Experiences
Teaser: Medical school was mostly boring and depressing. When it wasn’t either (or both simultaneously) of those, it was embarrassing and soul-crushing. The hardest part about writing this was narrowing it down to ten things. So I chose eleven. 10. How Much Was The Bribe You Gave The Fire Inspector? My first day of medical school was mostly benign. The week prior to that was a little fruity, what with orientation and getting to know all the freaks that were my classmates. But day one was the beginning of Business As Usual, which I was all for. I readily embraced the drudgery of classwork for a couple of years, since I knew that my upcoming time in the hospital would be utter chaos, amounting to endless hours of madness. So perhaps I was a little touchy in regards to anything unconventional that might come up. I’m pretty flexible, but Gross Anatomy Lab tested that flexibility, right on the first day. Half the class took Anatomy Lab on Mondays and the other half on Wednesdays. So 26 of us sat there on a Monday afternoon, sitting in chairs or on the fucking floor in a small huddle as Mr. (he was not a doctor of any kind) Hammond explained how Lab was going to go. Hammond was new to the school, the old Anatomy Lab Instructor died the year before from liver failure. Hammond was an odd guy, maybe it was his time in Vietnam (he used to tell ridiculously tall tales of knocking out his Lieutenant and other feats of military badassery). Anyway, he kept an astonishingly straight face as he explained the absurd emergency evacuation procedure for the lab. “In case of an emergency evacuation of the lab, proceed out the door that opens to the outside, then meet at the dumpster. Then, we’ll go back into the lab when it’s safe.†First of all, that door was three feet off the floor, with no staircase or ramp leading up to it. It was over six feet down to the pavement on the other side, again with no stairs. Apparently, the lab had undergone some renovations in the recent past. Also, I wondered what the hell kind of situation would call for a temporary evacuation of the lab. A fire wouldn’t be temporary enough, and a chemical spill could take hours to clean up safely and properly. Who decides when it’s safe to go back? Fuck you, Hammond, if I have to jump out what amounts to a door-shaped window to escape some unimaginable calamity, lab is fucking cancelled for the day for me. Our class unofficially changed the rally point from the motherfucking dumpster to the bar across the street, the Li’l Waldorf, or “The Wal†as us cool med students called it. Like they used to say in ‘Nam (maybe), “Fuck going back.†9. Further Proof That I Am A Pervert One of the worst classes I took in medical school was Embryology. It was bad only for one reason: the goddamned slide shows. Converse to high school and college, slide shows suck in medical school as a general rule. They’re never of anything pleasant, and you usually end up having to remember the goddamned things for tests, with nothing beyond your own hastily scribbled notes for help. But in Embryo, they were a special kind of awful. Anencephaly, hydrocephaly, gastroschisis, situs inversus. I won’t even traumatize you by explaining what those things are if you don’t know, beyond this: they’re all congenital conditions that result in horrifically malformed babies. Mummified post-term fetuses discovered on autopsy of the mother, anyone? Slide after eye-melting slide, like Satan showing his baby pictures. Beyond that horror is something fairly as bad, though. I was due for a visit from my fiancé that weekend (she was 500 miles away earning her degree), and I was horny as fucking hell. So horny that, upon seeing a slide of a baby with hydrocephaly, I likened the image of the baby’s swollen head to that of my fiance’s ass, and I got a hard-on. Now that separates the men from the boys, I can tell you. 8. The Fifty-Dollar Swamp At my stupid medical school, the first year students’ auditorium was on one side of the school, the second years’ on the other. One parking lot was close to the building, more near to the second year students’ auditorium. No matter where you parked when you were a first year, you had to hike it. But in your second year, you had a modicum of convenience. Naturally, something had to screw that up. So halfway through my first semester of my second year, our idiotic administrators gated off the parking lot and claimed it was the site for the new medical school library. Actually, it was just a ploy to get a tax write-off or secure earmarked funds or some shit for the library. They had no intention of actually building it yet, they just had to break ground by the end of the calendar year. So they literally broke ground – they dug a huge fucking hole where the old parking lot used to be, and ignored it for a few months until January. Then, they filled it in with dirt and took down the gate. We were allowed to park there again, in the fucking mud since it was winter and all it does is rain and snow in the winter in Reno. And then in the spring, it just rains, hooray. Or we could park a mile or so away, some choice. I least I could rationalize never washing my car. All this for a fifty-dollar-a-year parking permit. 7. Well, At Least Know I Finally Know What The Worst Thing I’ve Ever Smelled Is My last night on call on my Internal Medicine rotation in my third year was fairly eventful. Internal Med was my first rotation of my third year, twelve weeks of fiddling around with sick old fucks. If you get sick and need to go to a hospital, then you need to stay for nonsurgical reasons – ostensibly, that is – then you get treated by an IM team. In a teaching hospital, that team is usually a couple of residents, an intern or three, and a med student, under the supervision of an attending physician. At my hospital, the IM teams consisted of the attending, two senior residents, three interns, and one or two students. Anyway, the IM rotation was twelve long weeks, and by the eighth week (the last in-hospital, the final four weeks are in clinic, which isn’t much better), I was all jaded and experienced. I was sitting in the doctor’s section of the ER, bullshitting with Adam, a cool intern who was on my team and on call that night with me. We were goofing on each other, laughing and shit, one of the only times I really laughed in medical school. Then this twerpy surgery resident, Tulie (his real name. WTF kind of name is “Tulie?), meandered in with his own student in tow (who, as it turned out, was Lisa from my Top Ten Worst Things I’ve Ever Jacked Off To list. We sort of met then). He cast disparaging glances at the unauthorized fun Adam and I were having, as he went in and out of the Isolation Room. Finally, he came over to our desk. I thought he was going to chastise us or something. “I’m looking for the Medicine team.†Tulie was a short, bald, black guy in his early thirties. He had a voice like Richard Pryor used when he imitated white people. “You’re looking at them,†Adam replied with a smile. He didn’t like Tulie either, and Adam had that Mormon “kill-‘em-with-kindness†approach to people he didn’t like. Tulie was nonplussed at Adam’s levity, to say the least. “The patient in Iso needs to be admitted.†Tulie was right, the guy in Iso was an uncontrolled diabetic who’s foot was gangrenous and needed to be amputated. I hadn’t gone near him, but then he was a surgery candidate, so I didn’t need to. Which was why Adam had surgery – Tulie – paged. Green Foot was his bag, not Medicine’s. “Yeah,†Adam replied, “that’s why we paged you. He’s a surgical candidate.†“But he has diabetes.†Hospitals don’t admit patients for diabetes, unless it’s for a first-time diagnosis. You don’t have to. “Yeah, but he’s getting an admit because of his foot.†“His foot, as a result of diabetes.†Tulie was obstinate. Surgical residents hate yucky illnesses like diabetes; you can’t cut out someone’s pancreas to cure it. Fuck anything you can’t cut off and/or replace with something plastic, surgery says. Anyway, disputing this retarded chicken-or-the-foot argument with a dick like Tulie was pointless. We took him. Which meant we had to examine him. Examine his gangrenous foot. He’s in Iso for a reason. His foot fucking stinks. Rotting flesh is the most horrible thing I’ve ever smelled, without question. He had a black pit in his foot, about the size of a silver dollar. I can’t describe the odor beyond that it’s something like the worst locker room you’ve ever smelled, concentrated and magnified a thousandfold and shoved up a dead fat guy’s asshole for several days. It was a palpable stench, one that coats your mouth and tongue, one you smell for fucking hours later, even when you try to eat. You look at your chicken breast, think rotting foot and head for the salad bar. That’s a smell that invites itself in and passes out on the couch, if you know what I mean. 6. It’s Not A Rabbit Out Of A Hat, But It’ll Do During the first month of my third year while I was on Internal Medicine, my attending physician was Dr. Stein, who we all called The Beastmaster in private or simply The Man if in earshot of the more craven residents. You’ll find a more in-depth exposition of The Beastmaster coming in at #2 with a bullet on this list. He was a rat bastard, but as a whole, not that bad of a teaching doc. We were rounding on the patients in our service when we came to one lady in particular, who had been admitted for a severely low platelet count consistent with a hemolytic autoimmune disease such as lupus or BLEEDEEBLEE. She was laying there in her bed, half zonked even though she wasn’t on any anxiolytics or strong analgesics like morphine. The team’s senior resident, Brad, a cool-as-ice friendly little Korean guy, was giving The Beastmaster the rundown on Mrs. Thinblood as he examined the patient himself, an annoying habit of his. The Beastmaster interrogated the lady (after introducing himself, as he always did, with “Hi, I’m Dr. Stein, I’m one of the boss doctors here.â€), but she was barely responsive. She was also breathing irregularly, for no apparent reason. The Beastmaster huddled us over to the other side of the semi-private room. “Why is she so non-responsive, and why is she in apparent ARDS?†ARDS was Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome, a fancy way of saying “breathing funny.†Nobody on the team knew. Even if I did, I wouldn’t say. Fuck drawing attention to myself. “Well then,†The Beastmaster said, with obvious impatience, “maybe we should examine her and find out. Didn’t anyone examine her this morning? Whose patient is this? She should have been examined two or three times this morning by now.†Thank God she wasn’t my patient; turns out she was a turf from another team for some reason that I can’t remember. We all breathed a collective sigh of relief at that, as this was Somebody Else’s Fault, and nothing calms the soul like a SEF. The Beastmaster examined the lady more carefully. He opened her mouth and fiddled around in it for awhile, rooting around with his fingers and a penlight. “Hmm…she has something in her throat.†Oh, I can’t wait to find out what. That scene from The Silence of the Lambs sprang into mind instantly, and I thought If he pulls a moth out of her mouth… If only. The Beastmaster reached down into her throat with a pair of forceps (tweezers; never call them tweezers in medical school, forceps or “pick-ups†if you were a surgeon), and appeared to wrangle for a few seconds with something. “Okay, let’s see what this is…†As he withdrew the forceps, an impossibly long, large rope of mucus slithered out of the lady’s mouth. It was about the size of a banana, in both length and girth. And color too, maybe a little more uniformly yellow-brown, but there it was. It plopped into her lap. The Beastmaster picked it up again. “Get the trashcan over here, Brad,†he said, as Brad was literally gagging. Apparently, mucus was Brad’s personal Kryptonite, interesting since I had seen him do all kinds of nasty things, most of them involving blood. Within minutes, seconds even, Mrs. Thinblood perked up significantly, and her breathing was spot-on normal. I guess I would to, if someone pulled a snag the size of a baby’s arm out of my throat. 5. The Kenyon Factor Dr. fucking Kenyon. I have not changed his name either, because I hate him too much to hide it. Dr. Kenyon was the single fruitiest fucking instructor I had in my first two years of medical school. He ruined every class he helped teach. You see, in medical school, most classes are taught by several professors in a rotating fashion. Some only teach a couple weeks’ worth, few teach more than half a semester in total. Dr. Kenyon always showed up for a good month in any class he helped teach, the fucker. In Cell Biology, a retardedly easy class until he showed up, he introduced his ridiculous diagram illustrating membrane permeability. He seemed to think that he made it up from scratch, so he called it the Kenyongram. His lecture notes were Powerpoint slides that didn’t help much unless you scribbled all over them to make sense of his cryptic slides and poor attempts at humor. He was quite obviously a very brilliant man, but as such he only like to lecture on stuff that he found interesting, which was naturally esoteric and almost never appeared on an exam. At least his lectures weren’t boring. He liked to emphasize his bullshit points by violently whacking the projector screen with his “pointer,†a four foot piece of PVC tubing with electrical tape at one end for a handle. He had a laser pointer, but he didn’t like its lack of heft. He liked to tell us to ignore certain chapters in our textbooks, and then ask a dozen or so questions from them on the next exam. I learned to ignore him after he pulled that maneuver the first time in Cell Bio. And you could tell which test questions he wrote, because they were barely-coherent. He ruined Neuroscience and part of Physiology in the same manner. We didn’t like a lot of our professors, but only Dr. Kenyon got a verbal “Oh, no†from half the class when he walked in to teach. 4. Bill Dungsroman, Microbiology Expert. During my second year I had Pathology, a year-long course that was challenging but pretty interesting. The course was taught mostly by one guy, Dr. Nakimura. Dr. Nakimura was a diminutive Japanese fellow who was a real pisser in class. We had several instructors in lecture, but the first hour of lab was always with Dr. N. In lecture or in lab, the procedure was the same: Come Prepared Or Die. Dr. N’s philosophy was simple: ask a question, figure out who doesn’t know it by body language or facial expressions, then ask whoever doesn’t seem to know. If they do, keep asking questions until one is asked the student doesn’t know, then find somebody else to pick on. After awhile it became rather humorous, as Dr. N’s rough edge wore down through the year, and his insults didn’t bite anymore. Early on though, after guys |
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