Rite of passage

There are a lot of important milestones during the medical student's career. The White Coat Ceremony, clerkship, getting our first pagers, being on-call, receiving our MD degrees. All things we experience as we journey on our path to full-fledged doctory-ness. But there are also those other things... other not so pleasant tasks that as medical students we must experience as well. Being pimped by an attending? Accidently oversleeping when being paged? DREs?

Well as luck would have it, I may now cross off the latter from my list.

DRE's fyi, is the fancy medical term for when a doctor inserts his/her finger into a patient's rectal canal. This way you're suppose to be able to feel the prostate, masses, cancers, etc. etc [I say 'suppose to', because let's face it, I didn't really know what I was feeling for and I think neither I nor the standardized patient wanted to prolong the procedure].

This week for clinical skills was our male reproductive health session. That meant having the SPs (I really hope they got reimbursed very well for this session) teach us how to examine the male patient's .. how do you say it nicely... 'tenders' (as said very apropos by Po in Kung Fu Panda) along with the DRE (Po, incidently has a very nice DRE face going on here).


We watched a video on basic how-to's, then were paired off (guy + girl) with a tutor and SP to practice what we learned.

Yeah, initially it was sort of awkward. But whatever, I man-ed up, put on my serious/professional look and just did it. To be honest, my guy colleague seemed much more nervous than I. The only thing was that I kept asking the SP "are you sure this is okay?", "this isn't painful is it?" because honestly, some of these things didn't look too comfortable (uh, inguinal hernia exam? 'Nuff said). Fortunately, the SP and tutor reassured the female half of the group that it wasn't.

All in all it went better than I thought. At least I remembered to use lubricant. Unlike poor 3rd yr med student Deb Chen (watch at 2:30 especially):




Countdown to X-mas Break: 1.25 weeks!

A Chicken a Day

...keeps the med students' stomachs happy. So on Monday evening, after the Nephro exam, our honourary class president, Dr. Kidney, held a dinner for all 100+ of us. As you might have guessed from my oh-so-subtle title, it involved chicken. Roasted chicken to be exact. It was very nice and yummy and VERY thoughtful of Dr. Kidney to sponsor this for us. This leads me to conclude that : a) he is awesome b) he is generous c) he also must have a lot of "disposable" income. (Actually, he was also nice enough to pay for our course manuals and course notes for this block, which is way more thoughtful than expected since I probably spend like 5 hours a week just printing those stupid powerpoint slides... grrr...sorry I digress).



Anyways, yesterday was our annual gingerbread house contest. It's held to raise money for our various class charities. This year Truffles, cramberry, Doodles and I went with a pink and blue theme (okay fine so this isn't a real theme... we admit that we went to buy candy 30 minutes prior... and this is what came out).


In honour of our nephrology block (and maybe to sway Dr. Kidney's opinion, seeing as he is the judge), I also created our very own gingerbread nephrologist! With glasses, kidneys and bladder! Yay! Notice the anatomically correct bladder, with trigone included! (some people have mentioned that it looks like he has ambiguous genitalia ... I beg to difer.. they're kidneys, ureters and bladder! Bladder!!)

Fun times all around. Almost makes you forget that finals are in 2 weeks. Almost...

Countdown to X-mas Break: 2 weeks!