Wednesday, August 17, 2005

I am so much closer to being Dr. Dre

Well, I've started school again. I am a happy M1 (the oh-so-cool abbreviation for a first year medical student) and am thoroughly enjoying myself. However, as my life has been reduced to typing up the answers to my "Intended Learning Outcomes" questions and intending to learn them, my posting may be a little less frequent. However, I thought I would take this opportunity to create my own list of some of the coolest things that I have learned in the past few days.

10. It can actually be funny when professors make sex jokes. Somehow they seem appropriate.
9. My medical education will apparently not be complete without drinking. As much as I try to avoid it, the faculty keep making references to it.
8. When you have acute appendicitis, it gets all red, and sometimes there's some supperative exudate (read: pus!). Then, when it dies, it turns all black! (Yay pathology lecture slides!)
7. There are very few genetic components to the following disease condition: a man is looks both ways, crosses at the crosswalk, and out of nowhere an 18-wheeler crushes him.
6. The immune system response can be adequately paralleled by the invasion of Saxon England by the Normans.
5. "It's not fair to just look at the liver histopathology slides and say, 'oh, this guy was on the sauce.'"
4. When a part of your brain dies, the immune system turns it into soup and you end up with a hole.
3. It's okay to cry in small group sessions, because secretly it makes everyone feel better even if it feels really tense and horrible at the time.
2. Good old German pathologists named lots of things after food. My most recent encounter: "caseous necrosis" = dead tissue that looks like Brie, or maybe Parmesan
1. "You just can't have 30 lbs of dead meat swinging in the breeze..." without getting gangrene.

You may have noticed that many of these seem to come from my pathology course. This is because I love pathology, and both my pathology lecturers are... wow... in two different ways... but wow...