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!