Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Paging Dr. Idiot...

I'm having this really terrifying experience over and over again, now that I'm starting to get back into the clinic. Basically someone mentions a medical finding or fact, or sometimes asks me a question about medicine, and one of three things happens:

1. My brain drops into my feet and I can't form real words, just words like "whosywhatsis" or "thingy", which are not traditionally accepted medical terms.
2. The initials of the answer pop into my head, but nothing more (for example, if the answer is "pyogenic granuloma", what my brain comes up with is "P. G."). This is not even a little helpful, and I'm pretty sure my brain is intentionally taunting me.
3. I come up with something that is kind of similar--for example, a related disease which would appear on the same page of a medical textbook as the correct disease, but is not actually the correct disease. You might think that isn't too bad, I'm in the ballpark and all, but it is true that close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. Not so much in medicine. For some reason, they always want you to be actually right, not just kinda right. What makes this much worse is that I think my answer is actually correct.

They say that all the stuff you learned in 1st and 2nd year medical school will come back to you. I'm clinging to that idea like a ramora. Other than the creeping suspicion that I am a medical idiot, things are going well. Lab stuff has wound way down and I'm trying to do some studying. Notice I say trying.

I'll try to post some stuff I wrote a little while ago about graduate school tomorrow. In the meantime, if you're looking for medical information which is incorrect in one of three idiotic ways, drop me a line!!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

ah yes, i call this the boards study recovery syndrome...

apparently the only medically-related facts that are still stuck in my head are the ridiculous crap my friends and i came up with for remembering stuff for the boards - except that those silly memory tools no longer have a clear connection back to the actual disease.

an example? can anyone tell me what springs to mind when i describe a chain-smoking jewish guy with fat fingers?

something tells me my attendings are NOT going to like patient reports that sound like that...

Dr.VonB said...

I am *so* relieved that I'm not the only one...