To call a rose by any other name is wrong and you should read more.

Doctor: And what else can exacerbate MS?
Medical Student: Hmm, heat?  And so patient's can wear a cold vest in the summer as part of their treatment, I believe.
Doctor: Yup, do you know what that's called?
Medical Student:  Oh man, I know I learned this.  Starts with a U...
Doctor: Yup.  It's German.
Medical Student: Urdiff, urtenoff
Doctor: Uhthoff's phenomenon
Medical Student: Right Uhthoff's phenomenon!  I'm glad you told me.  I almost didn't know the name of the phenomenon that I just described, making it very clear that, although I know about this disease, both showing you that I'm working hard and reinforcing that I can eventually help people with this devastating diagnosis, I could never use it in a sentence.
Doctor: Yes, and as you mentioned, and I made obvious with my questioning, you almost didn't know the name, thus rendering it useless.  While trying to explain MS to a patient, without being able to say, "Uhthoff's phenomenon" you would likely have to make use of easy to understand terms describing the phenomenon directly and making it accessible to anyone.
Medical Student: Good point.  What a waste of my medical education that would be.
Doctor:  Exactly...exactly.

Hard crowd. Sorry, tough crowd

We have actors come in, pretend to be patients, and give us bullshit feedback about our empathy levels. It's pretty asinine so when my buddy saw a patient with erectile dysfunction he said, "that must be hard for you...or not". He was thrown out of the room.  Later, a portrait of him will be hung in our hallowed halls.

I need some water and some therapy

Med school really tests out your basal instincts.  You will regularly find yourself in the midst of 7 hours into the day without eating, drinking, peeing, sitting, or sleeping for days on end.  Suddenly you get 5 minutes free to yourself and now you have a decision.  Or rather I should say, your basal reptilian brain stem has a decision.  I find it really interesting to stand there for a second and realize that peeing, yes, urination, that's what I want to do with my 5 minutes.  Or water, today water is what I really need most.  And some days I just curl up on the ground and rock back and forth until I've exhausted the tears.  Whatever it takes to get through the day.

I'm not in a bad mood, I just don't like you

Nothing gets me back to work faster than someone I don't like trying to talk to me. 


Fucking busy here, ok? Take your "free playoff tickets" elsewhere.  I know it looks like I'm on facebook, but I have to go through all 6 pages of my notes and make sure all the bullet points have the same margins, OK?...Douche bag.

An Apple a day keeps the doctor, and everyone within ear shot, happy.

Remember when you were a kid and you had that video, the one that you watched so many times that to this day, if someone played the opening song, you'd probably have a fun-seizure?  Remember how, when you think back to it, your parents really just used that video to shut you up when they needed a free hour so they could go put the laundry away (which always took a surprisingly long time and was pretty noisy and, wasn't...wasn't the laundry still in the basement that one time you went down and checked)?  Well think if you could have access to that video at any time or place, wouldn't that be awesome?

Enter...the iPhone.  Ask me how many parents I have seen use it to calm their kid down while I listened to their tiny, but mighty hearts. Two hundred thousand.  In my 3 weeks of out patient pediatrics, I saw two hundred thousand parents use an iPhone to calm their child down.  I once saw an 18 month old unlock the phone, find her video and play it.  18 month olds can't draw a circle or hold in their pee and this one could operate a $200, flash drive powered, touch screen.  It's like the moms who lift a car to save their child, only instead of parents finding unbelievable amounts of strength to save the love of their life, these are kids that really fucking love those pious vegetables. It's the most underrated feature of an apple product yet.  Even more underrated than those really neato, neon, see-through macs they created a few years back.

Doc, I either A. Broke my radius B. Broke my ulna C. Broke my scaphoid or D. Broke my hamate, can you fix me?

Thanks to shelf exams, I feel very proficient in my ability to treat a case of Tylenol overdose if that patient gives me their story in under 1 minute and comes in holding 4 antidote drugs labeled A-D*, only one of which will work.


*Note:  If the past three patients all required drug B to treat them, and this patient is holding what I believe to be the correct drug name labeled as B, I cannot be held responsible for incorrectly treating them due to the Not Being Expected to Answer the Same Letter 4 Times in a Row, One of Them Must Totally Be Wrong Act of 1978.

Challenge: Describe anal sex without using the term anal and still sound professional

Me: "Do you have vaginal, oral or anal sex"
Patient: "Anal sex? What's that"
...
...
...
Blink
...
Me: "Uh"
...
Me: "You know vaginal sex?"
Patient: "Yeah"
Me: "Uh, the uh, other...one..." (extremely vague hand gestures)
Patient: "What?"
Me: "When you put it in the butt."
Patient: "Oh yeah, I definitely do that."

I put them in Penn binders, just in case I forget what school I attend

I still keep all of my notes just in case I want to go back and take medical school again.

Taste buddies

I need to start asking sales people more questions, just to get a better feel for what kind of person I'm dealing with.

Oh you like this messenger bag best? Well from our earlier discussion, you like Creed and think that Power Rangers was a better show than Ninja Turtles, take your shitty bag back to the backroom and find me something in a nice Raphael Red*.

*Note: other options for this joke would be: Michaelorangelo, Donaturple, Blue-onardo

Hi, I'm the medical student who is both working on your team and probably taking that bed next to you.

It's always fun when you walk into a patient's room after hearing they have some vague complaint like, "stomach pain", and, after 15 minutes of talking to them, you realize they likely have some massively contagious viral gastroenteritis that commonly starts with stomach pain only to turn into days of vicious diarrhea and frat worthy projectile vomiting.  Hmm, I see a blood pressure cuff machine, an oxygen tank with nasal cannula, where's the machine that turns back time so I can put on a mask and gown?

Gnomebody knows the trouble I've seen

I get all of my bullshit spam email between 1 and 4am.  It's not real spam, it's spam I deserve, Amazon, Borders, STA, things I actually signed up for. Things I will get for the rest of my life that will cause me no actual harm, but must be annoyingly eliminated every so often (not all together unlike herpes).  When they do come (the spam, not the herpes), it's always over night.  I inevitably wake up to 2-3 emails that have been dropped in my inbox while slumbering or beamed in at that exact second I turned to make a sandwich while drunk after the bars close.  It's like the Spam Gnome, waiting patiently behind that last tab for the perfect opportunity to swoop in and offer me free shipping.

(Or Gnome herpes.)