Insulting your fellow students

For future reference, insulting your peers is not a good way to get them to do what you want. Or, for that matter, to send you referrals in the future.

This is a copy of a letter to the entire class list serve from a fellow student. (By the way, this is the same student who told an ob-gyn and research interest group that poor mothers who keep having children should be sterilized for their own good)

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1.Class starts at :10 after. If we are so lucky as to get a 10 minute break in a 2 hour class its is a 10 minute break. Not 25, not 23, not even 11. 10 minutes. I know its hard to keep track of the clock with your ADHD and your lazy eye but i hear Timex makes a wicked digital watch and maybe its time you got one.

2.Stop talking in class. I don’t care if your leg length disparity causes you to swell like a eunuch. I don’t care if jaime is nursing her dog’s sister’s first-cousin’s pet squirrel. And i especially could care less if ronnie’s hair looks really nice today. If you are so smart as to not pay attention in a class then do something else. Check yourself out for ehler-danos, look on facebook to see if muffy finally hooked up with fernando at the handcuffs and handles party, take your underwear off a-la-Hansel, but for god’s sake do it quietly.

3.90% of the class pays for their education. I am personally deep in debt and im sure most of the kids talking are in the same boat. Look at it this way: if you pay for 2 hour movie and it just cuts off after an hour into the show, how would you feel? Except in this case you might actually miss something important and later on kill someone (in 2000 “accidental” hospital deaths were 8x higher than gun related deaths in America).

4.If a teacher makes a joke, it is not a ticket to talk. Yes, the joke is funny. Yes, everyone loves laughing. But what the heck are you talking about afterwards? If you want to tell your own anatomy jokes wait till the end of class.

5.Please send this to the dental students. As much as the d.o. kids don’t pay attention, these geniuses talk throughout the whole damn lecture.

thanks,

student

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My letter to our ethics committee:

I have a serious problem with the letter M– Student sent out today. I have no issues with him complaining about lateness or noise in the auditorium. There overall tone of the letter was sarcastic and insulting. Mocking diseases (like ADHD and “lazy eye”) in a letter to a medical school class is disturbing. I am sure there are members of our class who may be diagnosed with ADHD (and who knows, may have a “lazy eye”, like my brother who had a brain tumor removed). And, it is inappropriate even if the diseases-as-insults analogy didn’t specifically apply to members of our class.

Put the kid to bed

Rant:

I just left my study hole at Starbuck’s because a group came in with a child that was, by my guess, a few months shy of his second birthday. It was about eleven at night on Friday. The kid was alternating between shrieking in laughter and crying. The “grown ups” with him weren’t much better, talking really loudly and cursing a lot around the toddler. I finally left at 11:40 p.m. when it was apparent that they didn’t give a crap about the kid’s bedtime or my studying.

There was a reason why I was in a coffee house at almost midnight and my three year old was home, sleeping in bed. Because that’s the way it’s SUPPOSED TO BE. Put the kid to bed.

Blog Day for MOTHERS Act

Thanks PostPartum Progress for putting up so much great information about the MOTHERS Act. Please read all about it on the site, but here is a quick synopsis:

“What is the MOTHERS Act? The Moms Opportunity to Access Help, Education, Research and Support for Postpartum Depression Act, or MOTHERS Act (S. 1375), will ensure that new mothers and their families are educated about postpartum depression, screened for symptoms and provided with essential services. In addition, it will increase research into the causes, diagnoses and treatments for postpartum depression. The bill is sponsored by Senators Menendez and Durbin.”

Moms need help to go get the help they need, if that makes sense.

Crazy day in gross

Well, I finally thought I had grown accustomed to gross anatomy. Today we hemisected the pelvis. What that means is, we sawed one of the legs off, from about the belly button and lower spine down.

“Get her in the lithotomy position,” said one of the professors. This is one of the professors I like, who always has disgusting stains around the pockets of his white coat and is way too eager to touch the bodies with his own bare skin, either above his gloves on his arm or through the holes in his gloves that he invariably rips.

So, he guides us to jack our cadavers legs up, way way up. Perpindicular to the body. Ummm, the lithotomy position is the feet in stirrups position, kind of the obstetrical equivalent of the missionary position. As I was holding the leg straight up in the air as he sawed away with a hacksaw, I thought “I am so happy you are not my gynecologist!”

Then I got to see old feces scraped out of the sigmoid colon, saw countless legs go by as classmates carried them to rinse the rest of the feces out in the sinks, and watched them come back to the tables, dripping. *shudder* Finally, at the end of the lab I got to wash cadaver feces out of our hacksaw. Niiiiice.

But, dissecting the female pelvis was fun in between. I was bummed to find out our cadaver had no uterus. I had a feeling she wouldn’t from the beginning. Considering her age, and that hysterectomies were the gallbladder removal of the eighties, I figured they got rid of that unnecessary organ on her as they did to so many other women her age. She did have a lovely ovary (just one) and fallopian tube.

OK, I need this.

This shirt rocks!

I need this. Christmas is coming….

Histo down, and plush guts

I took my Histology midterm today. Middle of the semester, middle of Black October. Middle difficulty. I think I got a middling grade. I walked out of the written thinking I knew the material and was confident. Yes, I was the first one done again. But, as I talked to people after the test, I kept finding out more and more questions I apparently got wrong. Sheesh. So, I am hoping for a low B.

On the practical, I knew most of the stuff. But, I wrote a few answers more then once. Then I changed a few of them when I was past that station. Then I changed some back. Sheesh, again.

I love my histo teacher. She is hysterically funny. She also has the best damn power points and notes I have ever seen. She is raunchy and irreverant, and knows almost every student by name. She played a riff from Phantom of the Opera to signal for us to change stations during the practical exam which is when we get to identify tissues and structures under the microscope. There was a rest station every row, with markers, stickers, stamps, toys, and candy. We were encouraged to decorate our tests.

On a slight tangent, speaking of body tissues, a friend of mine passed along a link to this total cuteness: i heart guts!. They better start selling those plush organs soon, because they are so cute they make me want to plotz. And, as a bonus, you can pick your favorite organ and become its friend on my space. I have befriended the uterus.

Almost halfway out

I am almost halfway through Black October, and I think I see the light at the end of the tunnel. Too bad it’s after a test in Histology (ugh), Biochemistry (ugh), gross anatomy (UGH!), and physiology (ugh).