Roses are red...

My heart will go on

I love the second - sometimes third - Sunday of every February because that's the day I run over to PostSecret and see what valentines other people - lucky and unlucky - in love have sent in to Frank. It's nice to see that secretly, some of us are all dorky high school nerds quoting romantic comedy cliches, standing before boys, asking them to love us.



I've got company in the hopeless romantics circle.

Black holes and revelations

It's impossible.

I look at my stacks of notes and books, kilobytes of information saved on my computer, and the drug charts and mechanisms I've taped to my mirror and fridge, and I just can't see how I'm going to do this. Everything goes in one ear, and out the other.

And I swear it's not for lack of trying.

It really is impossible. More impossible than happily ever afters, that one song from Man of La Mancha, and drawing perfectly straight lines without a ruler.

I want to tear my hair out. It's so frustrating that I seem to have lost all capacity to learn.

I guess I should take comfort in knowing that other people are feeling the exact same way. One of my friends wore a really cute hat to school today, and when I complimented her, she replied, "I hate hats. I'm only wearing one because I need physical barriers to keep the information from flying away..."

So true. Except, forget retaining the information, I'm having trouble getting the material into my head to begin with.

How on God's green earth, am I going to get all of this information into my head? By 8AM on Monday?

It's impossible.

Keep your fingers crossed for me that I beat the odds. 170:1.

Sway

I will never be a gastroenterologist.

I love food. I have no problems announcing my bodily functions, especially when my mother calls ("Sorry Mom, can't talk now - need to poop!"). And I can take on the biggest burper you know, and still beat them in a belching contest. My non-medical friends will call me up and tell me all about the color of their stool, alarmed that they might be suffering from some terrible disease (when really it's just a case of Bad Chinese Take-out).

That said, I will never be a gastroenterologist.

This week, in our Physical Exam Skills class, we were reviewing the abdominal exam. Last year when we first did it, we practiced on healthy, relatively young, standardized patients. In other words, all of the things we were testing or looking for came up negative. We were doing all the tests, just for practice.

This year, they actually brought in patients with liver disease, enlarged spleen tips, ascites, and peripheral edema. And it was really cool to actually feel and see all these things we were supposed to look for.

We were on our feet for most of the two hours.

At our last station, I started feeling really weak. It was my turn to do the liver scratch test, and yet, all I wanted to do was sit down. In fact, all my body would allow me to do was sit down. So sit down, I did. But that didn't stop the room from spinning, as my peripheral vision started fading to black. And whoa! Did someone just turn up the heat? I felt like a furnace! Alarmed, I got up and excused myself from the room.

Pulling off my white coat, I said I needed some water (which I probably did), but honestly, I just wanted to get out of there so that my fellow classmates wouldn't see me collapse.

And that's exactly what happened the moment the door closed. Luckily, there was an instructor outside who caught me and pushed me into an exam room where I caught my breath and regained my vision.

I've been in Dance Marathon. In which I successfully stayed awake - while dancing - for a full thirty hours. On my own two feet.

I don't know what happened. But I went home, had some beef, and went to bed.

The next day, feeling much much better (it's funny how a good night's sleep can do that to you), I went to lecture and sat down next to one of my friends.

Arnold
Michelle!! I'm so happy to see you!!

Michelle
Hey you too! Uh, I'm happy to see you too?

Arnold
I mean, what happened yesterday?! You walked out of that room and never came back! And you just left your white coat crumpled up on the ground...

Michelle
Oh, hahaha. Yeah, I wasn't feeling well.

Arnold
I mean, when I saw that, I was like, Wow, Michelle saw that ascites patient and was like, that's it! Forget med school! I'm out of here! And in my head, I saw you throwing your white coat on the floor, sticking it to The Man, and just storming out.

Haha, if only it were that easy.

That said, I still don't know what caused me to black out. Maybe it was the smell, maybe it was the fact that I haven't had any meat in the past two weeks (salad diet, you know), or maybe I'm just overstressed and overtired.

But whatever it was, I know one thing. I will never be a gastroenterologist. And that suits me just fine.


P.S. It's freaking cold here in Chicago. Seriously, my face froze as I walked to class today. That is not cool dude. Not cool at all.

She's so high above me

In med school, we have this lovely little thing called Problem Based Learning (PBL). Theoretically, we have this class right after morning lectures and we're given clinical cases to solve. As a group we identify key facts and learning issues, and then at the next meeting, we come back, make five minute presentations on our topic, and find out new information about Patient X. Unsurprisingly, these cases almost always correlate to what we had just learned that morning. The point of this class is for us to synthesize the material and teach it to our fellow classmates - thus helping us understand the eons of information we end up just memorizing when push comes to shove.

More often than not, PBL turns into a two-hour class of fun and camaraderie, as we make study guides and cheat sheets for the million different diseases we're learning, and spend the first fifteen minutes gossiping about what we did over the weekend.

Oh, and someone always brings food.

It's good stuff.

It's fun, and we all know that it's not as effective as just sitting in the library with our books. Even the preceptors know this. Most of them just sit there looking pretty, and interject only when someone makes a glaringly huge medical mistake like...'pregnancy is a disease state found in men' or 'cholesterol is not related to blood pressure.'

But it's a required class (in fact, it's one of the reasons why our school ranks so high on US News), so we deal with it. We get through it as quickly as possible (goal: 1 hour or less!), and then we all go on our merry library-bound way.

So I'm in a group of seven students. Having been run through the PBL gauntlet, we all know how it goes down. You get the case, you read it, you discuss it, you come up with topics, and then you run home as someone sends out the pertinent information in an email.

Today was our second meeting. And the first thing our preceptor says is, "Well, our scribe had some spelling trouble last week." We all look around, confused - and then laugh nervously as we realize that Richard had misspelled some of the diseases and disorders.

Scary PBL preceptor
So, how do you spell polyhydramnios?

Richard
Uhhhh, P-O-L-Y-H-Y-D-R-

Scary PBL preceptor
[cutting him off]
Right...there is no 'e' sound right?

Richard
Yes, ma'am.

Scary PBL preceptor
You mean, 'No, ma'am.'

Richard
[stuttering]
No, ma'am, I mean, yes ma'am...uhhhhhh.

So then we proceed on with our case, and Bill - this week's scribe - stands up to write down information on the board.

Bill
[writing out 'apperant' instead of 'apparent']
Oh, oops, I spelled that wrong.
[Uses his dress shirt to furiously rub off his spelling mistake and hopes our preceptor didn't notice.]

All
[laughter]

Scary PBL preceptor
Huh. You must have learned spelling from Richard.

All
[dead silence]

The best part though? I think she loves the power she has over us. At the end of the PBL block, each preceptor is supposed to fill out an evaluation form. I like to read my evaluations after a particularly debilitating exam, because the self-esteem boost does wonders. The preceptors always write nice things, because I think they realize that if they didn't, we'd all be dropping out of medical school and wondering if we'd ever be socially and mentally competent to go out into the real world. It's often an afterthought on their part. Most preceptors completely forget about evaluations and do them off the cuff on the last day.

My preceptor though, lines up everyone's evaluation form on the table in front of her. At every single session. And writes down comments constantly. Incessantly.

Michelle
So blah blah blah prenatal screening is important la la la.

Scary PBL preceptor
But, Michelle - what does that all mean?

Michelle
[confused]
Uh, that there was fetal distress in the third trimester?

Scary PBL preceptor
But what does it MEAN?

Michelle
[giving up]
I don't know.

Scary PBL preceptor
Hm. Uh huh.
[writes furiously on Michelle's evaluation sheet]

She does that to everyone. And you know that you're in trouble when it happens. "Melody, did you look into the historical uses of amniocentesis?" "Um, no. I was supposed to look up the pathophysiology of preeclampsia." "Hm. Uh huh."

And that 'hm, uh huh' is always accompanied by furious paper scratching.

I can't wait to see what my evaluation at the end of the unit says.

Something that I already know

I was in the midst of writing today's post, when I got to wondering what I was going to title it...and then went into my old posts to see if I had already used the song title I wanted for this post. Answer, yes.

Then, I realized that this post I was writing? I had written it already. Two years ago.

From March 20, 2006 - Secret.

Nifty, fifty United States

Apparently, third grade geography class failed a couple of us.

Michelle
What are the five states that border Illinois?

Martin
Oh! Kentucky, Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, Mich- no, it's MO - MONTANA!

Michelle (aghast)
Montana?!?!

Martin (realizing)
Oh wait! No! MO is Missouri, not Montana!!

...

Later on that day, I'm telling my other geography-challenged friend about this exchange.

Elinor
Wait, what is the abbreviation for Montana then? MO is Missouri, MN is Minnesota, MA is Massachusetts..what the heck is Montana?!

[five minutes later]

Elinor
Ohhh, it's MT. I just wikipedia'ed it. By the way, did you know it's the fourth largest state? But with the 44th largest population in the nation? And that its name is Spanish for mountains? It's north of the Rocky Mountains, which is probably why it's called the Land of Shining Mountains.

Michelle (inner monologue)
Holy crap...this is more information about Montana than I ever wanted to know in my entire life.

Elinor
DUDE. MONTANA BORDERS CANADA. WTF?

[2 minute pause as she Google searches for a map of the US, while I geek out about how much I know about Montana to Martin.]

Martin
4th largest state?! No waaay!! It's like 2nd or something. Look how big it is! Hold on, I'm gonna Wikipedia total area of some of these states.

[30 seconds later]

Martin
DUDE!! DUUUUUUDE!!!!!

Michelle (alarmed)
What's wrong?!

Martin
Alaska is HUGE! HUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGE!

Michelle
I know, it's not drawn to scale on the map.

Martin
But look at it! [as he triumphantly shows me his computer screen of North America] It's enormous!!

Elinor
Omg, it's HUMONGO!

Michelle
Yes, it's the largest state in the nation.

Elinor
What?! I always assumed California was the biggest.

Michelle
...

Elinor
...

Michelle
Uh, there's also Texas.

Elinor
Oh yeah...I guess that state is pretty big too.