A man's gotta do...

I wouldn't be surprised if the doctor I've been shadowing is growing tired of me. After a couple of rounds of ludicrously moronic responses to straightforward questions, one would think he'd throw in the towel.

D: "So tell me what jaundice and cirrhosis are."
M: "Yeah, those are... you know, problems."

D: "What are microsomes?"
M: "Small... somes?"

No joke. Unfortunately. So you would think that the Doc's patience may be wearing thin, and that might give you some room to interpret what he said to me when I was leaving his office yesterday: "Maybe next week I'll schedule a sigmoidoscopy. Usually they're done in the mornings, but I'll see if I can do one in the afternoon."

To which I (of course) replied, "a what?"

To which he responded, "You take a sigmoidoscope, the patient bends over, and..." he then demonstrated the universally recognizable mime of feeding a fiberoptic tube up a man's rectum. Or losing at tug of war.

Awesome!

This August, on the first day of our orientation, I was watching some presentation about the first year's curriculum. The dean stood in front of us and told us that we would, throughout our time in medical school, be interacting with "standardized patients." Remember the episode of Seinfeld when Kramer's hired to play a patient with gonorrhea for medical students? He was a standardized patient. The school pays actors to help us practice taking a patient's history and administering a physical exam. These actors can then give you feedback on anything from your examination techniques to your demeanor. And as the dean was discussing the merits of using standardized patients, he says proudly, "this ensures that the first time you give a rectal exam, it won't be on a real patient."

So I laughed loudly. Because that's a funny thing to say. Right? Surely we're not paying actors to allow our little inexperienced fingers to plunge their rectums. Surely this was all a joke, right? A joke by the serious looking man at the front of the auditorium who seems entirely unamused by my very loud guffaw.

Looking back on that experience, I feel that there were some lessons to be learned that day:

First, despite the fact that I'm five or six years older than many of my classmates, they universally surpass me in maturity by several years.

Second, apparently, most student doctors get excited at the prospect of learning any medical procedure.

ANY procedure.

Third, there are harder ways to earn a buck than teaching first grade in the Bronx.

So I'm leaning towards the belief that the doctor I'm shadowing is trying to help me out. He did seem genuinely excited to able to offer me this chance (or he has fond recollections of losing at tug of war). We'll just have to see whether he's able to shuffle the schedule around next week so I can dive in on that sigmoidoscopy. If he does, I predict that, by the end of the year, there's going to be one blushing actor who's amazed at the expertise and dexterity of the medical student standing behind him.