A Hard Day's Night

DINGDINGDING, WE HAVE A WINNER:

 

Big announcement. I’m dropping out of medical school. I got this email a few days ago (click on it to make it bigger):

So that's why I'm dropping out. Who needs a career when you already have money? And who cares that Mr. Bente Lybecker can’t use proper noun verb agreement? Or that he is married to a flower rather than a woman? Not this guy. He’s "donating the sum of 2 million USD" to me. Just gotta cross the t’s and dot the i’s. And drop out of med school. It’s going to be a busy week for me. That being said, I'll keep typing on the off chance that I decide to stay in school and keep this blog going. 

 

I do stuff like this all the time:

On Wednesday, I put my shirt on backwards when I was getting ready in the morning. I know I know. Most of us do this every once in a while. But most of us don’t walk out of their apartment without noticing. Or ride the bus without noticing. Or attend their neurology class without noticing. Luckily, I eventually noticed and ducked in the bathroom between my first and second class and pulled the good ole switcheroo. Up to that point, had I committed a felony and gotten arrested, this definitely would’ve been my mug shot:

Hopefully, that doesn't shake your faith in me as a future health care provider. I'm trying to get my act together, promise.

Yo no espeake Medical:

So, according to my clinical group mentor, you learn 25,000 new words in medical school, approximately doubling your vocabulary. While I think that might be a slight exaggeration, I can attest to learning a ton of new words. I use and abuse the NIH Online Medical Dictionary. It's very useful for giving me the textbook definition of a term. What it's not good at, try as it might, is giving me the pronunciation.

Here's a quick example. I looked up the word telangiectasia a few months ago. According to the dictionary entry, it means little red/purple dots that come up in your skin due to capillary dilation (It happens secondary to various conditions.). Cool. Great. Now I knew what it meant. What I didn't know was how to pronounce it. After consulting the dictionary's pronunciation (To hear the dictionary's pronunciation, click on the speaker icon under the Telangiectasia entry), I quickly determined that was not the correct way to pronounce the word. At least not the correct way for a human to pronounce it. 

So, what's a med student to do? Well, I had a lot of stuff to do, so I moved on. Which worked out just fine, until I ended up needing to use telangiectasia in class in front of all my classmates. At that point you just take your best guess. And unfortunately, this is not an isolated event. It happens ALL THE TIME. I don't know how to pronounce at least 50% of words until I attempt (and often fail) to use them correctly. Part of the learning process I suppose. It's happened so many times that now, whenever a classmate asks me how to pronounce a word, this is basically my response:

Medical lingo. It really is a different language. So do I currently speak medical? No, not yet. Not fluently at least. But I'm working on it. And I've got telangectasia down, so there's one. Only 24,999 to go!