Back to School

This week is our first "intraclerkship week" which means we're sent back to a classroom for a week to get lectures, powerpoints, etc. There are a few differences between this and last year, including:

1) There's only about 30 of us, so lecturers like to make it more "personal" by calling on you (which I do not appreciate very much!)
2) The topics are much more clinically relevant, which means that it's a lot more interesting (for the most part)
3) Unfortunately since I'm used to being up around the hospital, sitting in a classroom makes me stiff and have major attention problems. I even brought coffee the past two days to school! (I haven't had coffee regularly since before rotations started in August!!)

Anyway, the lectures have been OK so far, and this week is a nice relaxing week for me to catch up on reading (which is hard to do when I have a wedding to plan and friends to play with!) and catch up on sleep (which is also harder to do than I thought!)

I was thinking of some of my favorite stories from the first four months this year, and here are my top two:

There was an older man who came in who was a poor historian when it came to his medical history and had an accent that sounded like he was from the deeeeep south and his tongue was too big for his mouth (I think he only had about five teeth). He said he was otherwise healthy other than some swelling in his legs and a surgery that he'd had recently that had been very painful. When I tried to elicit more information about this surgery he sort of blushed and said something that sounded like "weh-deh-hada-roda-ruda-ma-peda" and I had to ask him to repeat himself - multiple times - before I finally translated "well, they had to roto-rooter my peter!" I realized he'd had trans-urethral resection of his prostate for BPH. Needless to say, I was pretty embarrassed at that point! Of course, it did seem like a pretty good analogy...

I was working in the peds office in Bardstown and the doctor and I were seeing an infant who'd just started eating baby food. The doctor asked the dad "How are you doing with his feedings?" and the dad paused a moment and said "well, we do them with a spoon."