Wayfaring MD: Missionary Physician
I like to highlight the hilarious in medicine as I write about patients, medical school, residency, medical missions, and whatever else strikes my fancy. Oh yeah, and I like to use GIFs!
Disclaimer:
HIPAA is for reals, folks. All of my "patient stories" have been changed to protect patient privacy. I will change any or all identifiers, including age, location, race/ethnicity, sex, medical history, and quotes.
- Prof: Hey *******, this is Dr. R. I just wanted to let you know you've been accepted to (insert med school name here)!
- Me (meekly): reeeeallly?
- Prof: Really. Ok, now call your mom.
Anonymous Asks:
wayfaringmd Said:
Failing a class in medical school is not the end of the world. Lots of people do it and they still become doctors. Usually fails come because you prioritized the wrong subjects to study or you just couldn’t learn the material in the short amount of allotted time. Most schools will require some sort of remediation of the failed subject, though, to make sure you understand it well enough to get through boards.
Every school does it differently, so I’ll just tell you how mine does it.
We have 1 test every 6 weeks in the pre-clinical year. You can fail two tests per year with technically no penalty. However, each test is broken up by subject (we study by organ system, not by subject like biochem/path/anatomy, etc), and at the end of the pre-clinical years, you must have passed every subject for the 2 years. So it’s possible to never fail a test but to fail a subject, and it’s possible to fail a test but pass all your subjects. Does that make sense?
If you fail 2 tests, you’re in a sticky situation. You must pass every other test for the year and also all of your subjects, which could be pretty difficult after failing 2 tests. So you can either keep going and hope for the best or choose to repeat the year. Many folks choose to repeat after 2 fails rather than take a chance with a 3rd failure. With 3 fails you must automatically repeat the year.
If you fail a subject for the two years, you have to remediate. Remediation at my school is different for each subject, and many students end up remediating at least one subject (usually histology, neurology, or physiology at my school, because the professors write impossible questions).
I had to remediate neurology and physiology (I had averages of 64 in both. Passing is 65.) For Neuro I chose to take an oral exam where I would be quizzed on concepts of neurology. It was much easier than reading the crazy exam questions. I understood the concepts, I just couldn’t translate it to multiple choice. And for physiology we were required to take a standardized physiology test. It was super hard and I left the last 10 questions (out of 100) blank because I ran out of time, but I passed with plenty of room to spare.
The bad thing about remediation is that it cuts into your Step 1 study time. I didn’t do as well as I would have liked on Step 1, and I blame it mostly on remediation. There’s not a lot of phys or neuro on Step 1, so all my studying for remediation was mostly worthless for Step 1.
Sorry this answer is so school-specific. Just keep in mind that failing a class in medical school is not the end of the world.
- Getting accepted to med school.
- The first time you can recite or write all the steps of glycolysis and the Krebs Cycle from memory.
- Draining your first highlighter, and then getting a fresh pack of highlighters for Christmas.
- The first time you understand what House is talking about.
- The first time you catch an error on a medical tv show.
- The first time you actually know the answer to a family member’s medical question.
- The first time you diagnose yourself with a rare or fatal disease.
- Passing your first test.
- The first time you get to wear your white coat.
- Getting to see real patients for the first time.
- Not being the first person in your class to drop out.
- Finishing the year with no fails.
Hand Dropping Test in Pseudocoma:
When a patient is truly in a coma and their hand is released directly above their face, their hand should strike their face on its way down.
Neuroanatomy Through Clinical Cases by Hal Blumenfeld.
As if every one has never tried this on their sleeping younger siblings… I laughed out loud when I read it.
(via drshutterbug)
You can name more amino acids than past presidents.
Philip K. Dick
Our test yesterday was nuts. With 45 minutes left (the test was 8:00 to 1 with no breaks), I still had about 75 questions left. But I always leave the sections I’m best at for the end just in case I do need to rush though. I finished with about four minutes to spare, but I failed it. By one point. Life is crap. Luckily, we get to challenge questions on the test that we thought were ridiculous, and we usually get one or two points back, so I’m counting on that. And I have a feeling that a bunch of people are in the same predicament as me, so there will be lots of challenges.
………………………….And I passed my clinical skills exams that I took like 3 weeks ago (funny how it takes 4 hours to grade our MDEs and 3 weeks to grade clinical skills)! Woo! Mo is “depressed” because she didn’t do as well as she wanted. But she got a point higher than me. crazy.
As of 10 am tomorrow when my SOCA is finished, I will be a second year medical student who DID NOT FAIL A SINGLE TEST in her first year! Woo! Just got my score posted from today’s test. It was pretty mediocre like all my test grades, but hey, it was passing!
Wish my life was this awesome. Alas, my only study break thus far today (aside from these here tumblr posts) was walking downstairs to get bills out of the mailbox and pick up a box left by FedEx. Yesterday my break actually came pre-studying, as I had to go to the wonderful Health Dept to get that one final shot.
So yesterday my mom and I drove out to Havana and picked heaping pails of blueberries in the hot hot sun, and afterwards drank quarts of ice water and parked the car under a big oak tree to eat our Burger King.
Today I played a complicated game of centipedes versus people in the pool with my nine-year-old sister-in-law and chased frogs. And in the evening a group of friends and I discussed Love in the Ruins.
And tonight I came home to John and we watched an episode of Star Trek Next Generation overdue to the library, and he ate 13-month-old wedding cake and I ate blueberries and vanilla ice cream from my favorite bowl and remembered afternoons eating G&D Oxford Blue ice cream at the shop near our flat.
And all was well, despite the sunburn.
The it’s-the-last-test-of-my-first-year-of-medical-school-and-I’d-like-to-say-I-passed-all-6-but-study-time-is-running-out-and-I’m-stressed-because-I’m-also-packing-for-India Study Nest. Note the giant cup o’ tea.
I’ve been reading one of my pharm books today and I just came across the term “therapeutic abortion”. It really pains me. One more reason why I really REALLY hate reading Pharm.
So… one of the ladies who is in charge of grading our tests and posting the grades couldn’t come to work today. Come to find out, she’s got Bell’s Palsy. Heh. So hilarious that someone couldn’t grade our neuro exams because of a neurological problem. For those who don’t know what Bell’s Palsy is, it’s not serious. It is a paralysis of one side of the face and it lasts a couple of weeks. Anyway, just thought it was ironic.
today my roommate was completely clueless about a simple neurological exam. it bumped up my confidence about this test about a thousand percent.
Hand Dropping Test in Pseudocoma:
When a patient is truly in a coma and their hand is released directly above their face, their hand should strike their face on its way down.
Neuroanatomy Through Clinical Cases by Hal Blumenfeld.
As if every one has never tried this on their sleeping younger siblings… I laughed out loud when I read it.
Got our community medicine and family assessment papers back today. Remember that 70-ish page paper I turned in forever ago? Yeah, that.I think it’s funny that the department thinks it’s no big deal for us to work an 8 hour day, plus do 12 interviews (for most people in a town where they have zero connections), plus do research, plus do statistical calculations to add up to 70 pages in 2 weeks, and yet it takes a team of like 12 people 6 weeks to grade those papers. I got a 100 on my family assessment and a 95 on my community med paper, which shows me that no one actually read my papers, because they were crap. The time it took to grade them would have been ok if we could tell that they actually read the papers. My grade doesn’t even make me happy because it doesn’t hardly count for anything. If this was an MDE, it would matter. But no one fails out of medical school because of stupid community medicine.
The community med paper would have 5 or 6 pages of no comments, and then a page or 2 with lots of silly little word choice comments (capitalize “State” here but not here…use “among” instead of “in” here). Ridiculous. And my family assessment had no comments, just words underlined throughout the paper, like they were just checking off a list of key words.
Can you tell that community medicine is a very sore subject among students? Everyone loved the clinical experience, but we all thought the paper was a complete waste of time. And now I have wasted my time complaining about it. My Neuro MDE is in a week and a half. I have to go study something that actually matters. On to brains.
