Down There, and other thoughts

I dissected a clitoris today.  You truly know how far down into the medical school chasm you have dropped when you are standing around a table with a group of 4 people, all of whom have their faces about 2 inches from a dead woman's crotch, some of whom are holding her legs as far apart as possible, and all of whom in perfect seriousness are attempting to claw away at a clitoris to find the dorsal nerves.  As a friend of mine put the other day, "it's like being a porn star who specializes in sticking things up people's asses, except instead of making bank, we're all paying $50,000 a year for this beautiful experience."  So true, man, so true.  What this really means, though, is that gross lab is starting to take way too long to find very few structures.  On Monday, we spent 3 hours finding about 6 nerves in the ischioanal fossa.  That's right, we spent 3 hours picking fat our of a dead person's ass.  This is what happens to you if you donate your body to science.  I often wonder if our donors or their families really knew what would happen to their bodies when they made this decision.  I mean, personally, I don't think I would care, since you're not really "there" any more, but next week we are going to cut these people into quarters.  It just kind of makes you think. 

Our professor who teaches the pelvis is awesome.  Hilarious, actually.  I love him as a teacher.  Unfortunately, not so much on the material.  There's a lot of little bitty structures that go strange directions with no good pictures to use to visualize them, so rote memorization kicks in and it's kind of boring.  Especially when added to the MASSIVE amount of memorization we're doing for histology right now.  We have our histo final exam two weeks from today, and while we do have the blessing that it's not an actual cumulative final, it's still going to have twice the information on it of the last two tests, and those were brutal enough to study for.  I really don't mind studying--in fact, so far I feel like med school has been much easier than people made it out to be like--but for some reason histo just bores the living daylights out of me if I spend more than an hour or so doing it, probably because it's all just rote memorization of TINY (and I do mean tiny) differences between various things.  And it's hard to really get that you're going to need to know how to differentiate between a primary bronchus and a segmental bronchus on a slide at any point in your career, unless you become a pathologist, which I don't plan on doing.  

I find it interesting that whenever I tell people in school that I'm interested in pediatrics, I often get the response that people could never do that, that they want to do something exciting like surgery, etc.  It's rare to find someone (even among women, even among married women) who are actually currently interested in something like peds, or even ob/gyn.  Everyone, it seems, wants to be a surgeon, and I kind of feel like odd man out.  I have no interest in surgery.  I mean, I'm sure it's cool, and a good rush and all, but I have honest expectations about what I want in my lifestyle.  I want to have children before I am 35.  I'd like to start before I'm 30, although that might push it a bit.  But one reason I'm interested in peds (or possibly med/peds, since I sat in on a really interesting lecture about that the other day...but that's another blog for another time) is because I will graduate medical school at the age of 26.  Three years of peds residency puts me at 29 when I finish.  That means I could possibly have children in the last year of my residency or shortly thereafter and still be on track to not be 60 years old when they graduate high school.  I don't think there's anything wrong with that idea...but apparently there are just so many people who are content to put off the idea of family because it's not something they want *right now*.  Maybe it's because I'm already married, but I know that in six years, I am definitely going to want kids.  And I'm going to want to be around for them.  Really, I'd even like to be able to take some serious time off to spend with them, possibly even work part time if it's feasible.  And so I want to specialize in something that will accommodate that fact.  

On a completely different note...we've been having a lot of labs recently with our standardized patient.  In the past two weeks, we've learned to take vital signs and to do a lung exam (or at least to pretend that we know how to do one, since we really don't have to be able to recognize what we're hearing yet--only to demonstrate that we know how to go through the motions), and on Monday I'll do a cardiac exam.  A lot of people seem to think of these as a pain, but I love them, because I get to actually feel like a doctor and I see them as the "useful" stuff.  The "real doctor" stuff.  You get the idea.  And apparently, I'm good at the "real doctor" stuff...my SP for the lung exam told me I was the only person she'd had all day who percussed lungs the right way the first time.  Woot.  Unfortunately, I embarrassed the daylights out of myself in the vital signs lab when I walked in and the SP asked me to demonstrate how I would normally start an exam when I walked in the room.  I stuck out my hand, shook the "patient's" hand, and said, "Hello, my name is B, and I'm a medical student.  I'll be taking your vital signs today."  At which point the SP stared at me as though waiting for me to do something else.  So I continued... "What brings you in here today?"  At which point she stared more.  ...   "You need to ask for her name."   Oh....and here I thought we already had that on the chart.  Apparently not.  Ah well...it's a learning experience.  

Now, unfortunately, I must get back to memorizing the perineum, because tomorrow is the histo day from hell.