Today at grand rounds (fancy word for lecture) this stuffy-looking super old white man doctor sat next to me. I looked down at his feet and he had taken off his shoes and was wearing checkered socks (like Chad on Million Dollar Listing! Shutup that show is awesome) and about ten minutes into the lecture I looked over at him and he was sleeping and I giggled. About twenty minutes later I totally passed out and after the lecture my friend said, ‘You totally fell asleep, and that old guy sitting next to you looked at you and giggled!’
Aw.
Medicine really does have its own language. No one (and by ‘no one’ I mean ‘everyone in the medical field but no one in actual real life’) cares about the difference between an attending and a resident and a fellow and an intern and a student. Or morning rounds and teaching rounds and sugar rounds (not as fun and/or whimsical as they sound, unfortunately) and grand rounds and square rounds and ground rounds and whatever other kinds of rounds.
In my notes I write things like ‘74M h/o MDS, AR, HTN, DM p/w CP, SOB, cough x 1 week’. For our team’s teaching sessions I say things like ‘well, hemolytic uremic syndrome is essentially just thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (which itself is just thrombocytopenia plus microangiopathic hemolytic anemia with or without neurological signs, renal failure, and/or fever) with renal failure’. And that is me trying to make it sound CONVERSATIONAL. And yes I actually talk in parentheses.)
Part of it is tradition (medicine is old and honors tradition like whoa) and part of that tradition is about medicine being elite and doctors making a power play over their patients, because if I know this language and you don’t, then you are powerless to me, the all-powerful wise doctorperson.
That part of medicine kind of sucks. But most of the patients I’ve had are pretty great. Some doctors are all brains and no bedside manner. I’m pretty much the opposite. Did I tell you about the time I spent ten minutes talking to a lady about her gyne history and how she’d had a total hysterectomy… and then I asked her if she got her yearly Pap smears? She looked at me kind of funny and then said, ‘Uh, no… because I don’t have a cervix.’ Duh!
Luckily for me, even being the dumbest med student still puts me ahead of Nascar fans and