Last week contained fourteen hours’ worth of exams – our comprehensive “end of block assessment” for the systems of the heart, lung, kidney, and blood. Plus anatomy and many other things I didn’t know. The Friday portion of the exam was a three-hour multiple choice exam of boards-style questions. For those of you that aren’t medical people, boards questions are notoriously difficult and are representative of the test all graduating medical students must pass to match into a residency program. An example: Continue reading
renal
Impostor Syndrome
YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH.
There.
We have a test coming up next week, and it is a huge one. Normal and abnormal stuff for hearts, lungs, kidneys, and blood. There is a lot of stuff that is supposed to go right and a lot of things that can go wrong. (See? I’ve been studying!) The test is three days long, starting on Tuesday.
Vomit. Continue reading
Life In The Basement
After covering the heart and the kidneys, we’re now on the lungs. And with the lungs come chest x-rays. With chest x-rays come opacities and focal calcifications and diffuse consolidations. Also confusion, incompetency, and dismay.
We had an hour-long lecture on chest x-rays earlier this week by a very effusive radiologist. He was quite intent that radiology is the best specialty and nearly begged us to come visit him in the radiology suite, which I can only assume is a dark closet in the hospital sub-basement. He spent so much time trying to impress upon us that radiology is the funnest, greatest specialty of them all that I am quite convinced it is not. Continue reading
IDENTIFY. DESCRIBE. fail.
Somewhat boring/necessary background unless you’re in my class:
At most schools, anatomy is taught in one continuous block, usually at the beginning of the year. By the time September rolls around, most students can identify bizarre-sounding muscles and tell you which stringy pale thing is a vein and which is a nerve. It’s harder than you think.
Our medical school works differently than most. We learn anatomy in segments, according to whatever physiologic systems we’re covering that block. For instance, this 12-week block, called Homeostasis, includes the heart, lung, and kidney. So we’ve dissected most of the thorax, where the heart and lungs are, and examined normal and abnormal kidneys in pathology lab (I’ve written about this previously). Continue reading
Urine Denial
(The title? Sound it out. Get it? Eh?!)
I have spent the last two weeks learning about and discussing pee.
There are many different kinds of pee. Clear pee. Dark pee. Red pee. Orange pee. Foamy pee. Smelly pee. Oh, there’s more. Continue reading
Commonest Erythematous Palpation, Status Post
When I was a postbac student shadowing doctors in the hospital, I learned that medical centers have a status hierarchy all their own. It resembles a cult, actually. I wrote about this in “Medicine Dress Code:” medical students wear short white coats, residents have slightly longer coats, and attendings – highest on the seniority ladder – have near-wizard length, Merlin-style white robes. I have no idea where this custom originated or why it persists, but it is helpful in quickly indicating who you don’t want to irritate.
What I didn’t realize is that the medical world goes further into cult-dom than I originally thought. In fact, medicine has its own language entirely. Continue reading
crashing resident 