Is it because I is black?

Okay, so just when I thought things were getting relatively quiet and I would have nothing to write about, this happened.

One of my classmates is (and I suppose this is the correct term?) African American, and she is one of the most overtly offensive people I've ever had the misfortune of meeting. My first encounter with her was in the student recreation area, where I was watching some of my friends play ping pong, at which point she pulled up the chair next to mine, placed her feet atop some other people's briefcases and bags, and let out a massive belch. She did not make any attempts to say, "Excuse me" or anything of that nature.

Fast forward a few weeks, and I have yet another encounter with this lovely individual. This time, a friend and I were discussing the potential benefits of organic foods, and she walks up to us, not at all involved in this conversation, and says, "You're both fucking retarded. I go to Wal Mart and the food there is just as good as that useless shit that you're all buying. You're going to get cancer just as easily as I will, you fucking dumbasses." Lovely. So I'm busy thinking to myself, "What the Mother F...." and trying to figure out where she came from, and why she is so pissed off at us. After all, we were not saying that people that buy canned stuff are retards, we were merely discussing the various places we would go to buy our foods, and the fact that a lot of stuff labeled as "organic" in the US is hardly organic. My friend then starts to disagree with her, and says that a lot of research implicates processed foods in colon cancer and other diseases, at which point she retorts, "Statistics are a bunch of shit, and you're an idiot for believing them." Umm, okay, all they ever teach us in class came from statistics and so forth, but whatever.

So now it's this week, and I see little miss sunshine once again, this time because we were forced to work within a group. Immediately, after the group activity is over, she starts going on this huge rant because she went to some thing to help students learn interviewing skills, so they could be better prepared for their interviews for acceptance into medical school. She was pissed off that there were a bunch of "fucking rich ass white motherfuckers" at this thing, and was even more pissed off that she had to teach these "honkey pieces of shit" how to interview. She then concluded this tirade by saying that she was "going to have to whoop some white ass if this kept up." Terrific. And she is saying this in front of me, and some other people, all of which were ethnic minorities of some variation. And so I interpret this as a blatant attack aimed at me, since, well, I'm white, and she is going off on white medical students. At which point, I start to tell her that there are plenty of things in place to help minorities get into school, affirmative action (racist action as they should call it...) and blah blah blah. At which point she says, "Oh, and you got a problem with that huh?" So being the confrontational person I am I said, "Yes, as a matter of fact I do. These programs completely marginalize the lower socioeconomic classes of all races, but particularly that of the whites - poor whites are SOL when it comes to anything. Oh sure, they don't have any money, and have all sorts of hurdles to deal with, but hey, they're white therefore they must have it easy. Meanwhile, the rich Mexicans and African Americans have none of these hurdles, the only real racism they're exposed to is watching those old civil rights videos in social studies, and roll into school in their black Hummer H2 with Dubz wheels (there were multiple people in my undergraduate institution who owned similar vehicles, all of which were minorities)." This obviously starts her off on another tirade, in which the terms "honkey, cracker, cracka', bitch, motherfucka, whitey" are thrown around left and right. Eventually one of the other people in the group tried to change the subject, which was somewhat successful.

Assuming that the worst was over, I tried to change the subject again by asking if anyone was going to go to the Planned Parenthood seminar later in the day. This set her off yet again. She immediately exclaimed, "Why would I want to go to that shit when these people are a bunch of fucking assholes? I don't believe in a goddammed thing that they do." Being somewhat shocked by this, I immediately responded, "You don't believe that women should be made aware of the contraceptive options available to them and be informed about safe sex practices?" This was met with the eloquent argument of, "Those dirty bitches should keep their damn legs closed. I don't have to worry about none of dat shit because I don't fuck around like a fucked up rabbit bitch." I barely know what that means, but I do know that it hurt my head to listen to such idiotic drivel.


How in the hell is someone like this admitted into medical school? Are adcoms so obsessed with "diversity" that they are willing to admit flagrant narrow-minded racists into school? Just replace her usage of all derogatory words towards whites with derogatory words towards blacks (in France, we just say black and white, and no one cares - minority groups don't get offended by it, so I assume it's okay), and then pretend that she was white. From what I gather, she would be branded as a terrible, subhuman racist, who should be condemned to the darkest inner circle of hell, and ideally die after rabid porcupines are forcibly inserted into her rectum. But because she is African American and racist towards whites, it's not only perfectly okay for her to say these things, but also she should be encouraged to do so? What a load of horse crap. She doesn't even understand basic etiquette and views whites as inherently evil - what is she going to do if she ever gets a white patient? "Yo, honkey motherfuck, you have cervical cancer, which is good, because you shouldn't have fucked all dem frat boys when you was young, you fucking whore." Terrific. Just terrific.

Maybe one day I'll find some sane classmates, but that day is not today.


In other news, they lectured us today on why Dr. House is a very poor doctor. To them I say, "You're all poor doctors for not recognizing Dr. Gregory House's unbridled genius, and sublime analyses of human interactions, defunct social norms, and organization."

Put down the Fork!

Okay so this is a little mini-post relative to my others, but felt like I should impart some knowledge on you people (the 3 people that read this thing other than myself).

So it's been almost 3 weeks of med school now, and I have come to the following conclusions

1. There's MORE studying involved than what everyone says.
2. Anyone who says that you can raise a normal family and still be in med school is full of it, and is an asshole for trying to convince you otherwise. They probably derive sick pleasure at the thought of the unsuspecting people that will actually try to raise a family in med school, and then laugh as it all goes the way of Jack Nicholson's family in The Shining.
   
3. You don't feel like you know nothing. I don't get these people who claim that they are in med school and don't know anything. I already feel like I have learned an incredible amount of material and techniques, and it's been less than 3 weeks, which brings me to my most important point...
4. Stop eating. No seriously, don't you dare put that fucking bacon double cheeseburger anywhere near your mouth.

While in gross anatomy today, I had the pleasant opportunity to watch the pathology department mischievously pull the tarp off of a table containing "aortas from hell" (those words come from the pathologist, not me). Apparently the pathology department gets the opportunity to find all sorts of disgusting crap when they open up the recently deceased, and they decided to try and show us their chef-d'oeuvre of FUBAR arteries and veins. There were plenty of atherosclerotic aortas, but those were just the opening acts. Atherosclerotic vessels are characterized by a disgusting amount of white crud littered throughout, with a little bit of pox marks with the color of melted butter - cholesterol deposits.

After whetting our appetites for disgusting vascular disease, they presented the main course - aortas with massive anneurisms and clots. I shit you not, there was an aorta there that had a thrombus the size of a baseball (probably bigger than that, but whatever...) and in the two common iliac arteries that branched off of that were thrombi the size of lemons.

It sorta looked like this, but was 10x worse.

So anyway, just think twice before grabbing that extra cupcake or asking for bacon on your cheeseburger... your aorta could look like that, and then med students would poke and prod at it while giggling nervously. Oh yeah, get your labs done as per your doctor's advice - you can be skinny and still have high cholesterol too.

Anyway, back to studying....

Medical School!

Okay, so medical school started last week, and I've made it through the first week at Miskatonic U. Throughout this time, I have met many of my classmates, and am realizing that it is true what they say about med students - they're all freaks. This most likely has to do with the fact that all of them were pre-med at some point.

At any rate, a lot of our curriculum consists of sitting in small groups and working together. So I suppose if everyone in the group were very serious and motivated, this would work out very well and I really wouldn't have anything to write about. Since this post exists, this is obviously not the case. A lot of the people in the group, are, for lack of a better word, retarded.

Case in point, in the first group I was in met to discuss a book which we were required to read. During the discussion, most people were silent, except for this one girl, who I will be calling D-Cups for the rest of time. I am giving her this name, because she was wearing clothes that were solely designed to place her breasts on display. I intended to place a picture here to show exactly what she was wearing, but apparently it's such a huge slutty/fashion faux-pas that it just wasn't accessible in a GIS, because it would constantly pull up porn. She was wearing an A&F sweater with a zipper in the middle, which she had zipped down to just underneath her breasts, and a very tight white shirt resembling a man's undershirt, which allowed her boobs to essentially rest on top of the sweater's opening. Which, as we all know, is exactly what female professionals should all do if they want to be taken seriously. So long story short, she pretty much vehemently disagreed with everything I had said about the book. And when I brought up various scenes of the book that completely falsified her points, she would just get louder and more irritated. For whatever reason, she was hell-bent on disagreeing with me, and saying anything and everything she assumed that our faculty facilitator would agree with. Apparently she was at least halfway competent, as she (the faculty facilitator) was always siding with D-Cups, despite the fact that what D-Cups was saying was wrong! I don't really understand what the deal with that was. Later on, D-Cups admitted that she never read the book. Shocking.

So the next group I was involved in was a group that was designed to research cases. What I mean by this is we are given a case wherein a patient presents to the ER with some odd symptoms, and we have to come up with the diagnosis as a group. As time goes on, we are given patient history, physical exam findings, and basic lab results. Then the group comes up with various issues pertinent to the case that they would all like to know more about, and then they are divided up amongst the group members, we research them, present them to the group, and then relate them to the patient. So I had to do my issue, which was rather simple (they were all rather simple: what are normal lab values, vital signs, what's a heart murmur? etc), and in the process of doing it, I began to think about what was going on with this theoretical patient. In the end, after considering all of the information presented to us: history, examination, symptoms, labs, I ended up coming to a diagnosis after carefully eliminating 3 differential diagnoses. After spending around 45 minutes thinking about it, I just wrote it up into my presentation and explained my logic.


So when the time came to present my topic to the class, I was feeling pretty happy with myself. I explained the physiology of the system effected, the phenomenon being observed, and the pathophysiology behind it. At that point, I made my diagnosis, described some differentials, and then presented my treatment plan. At the end of my presentation, the doctor who was our faculty facilitator (different one from the aforementioned female physician) was blown away by my presentation. He thought that it was incredible that I was able to pull in all aspects of the case to arrive at my diagnosis, and found my presentation of the affected physiological systems to be superb. He then told me that I clearly wanted to be an Internist, and would make an excellent one some day (if he only knew that I was dead-set on plastic surgery, I wonder what he would have said...). At any rate, it was very flattering to have such praise heaped on you after one week in medical school, and I felt very accomplished at this point, and a lot of the worries about the difficulties of medical school more-or-less evaporated after he was done speaking.

An unintended consequence of my work had occurred, however: the group was pissed off. They were angry that I had done such an elaborate presentation, and had further assumed that I must have spent at least 8 hours preparing it (if they only knew that it had taken me around 1 hour to complete, I don't know what they would have done). They then said that we need to lay down future ground rules to prevent someone (read: me) from coming to such an elaborate conclusion without the group's consent. They were also angry that in the process of coming to my diagnosis, I had stepped into some of the issues that they were presenting on. I didn't see much problem in this - after all, to diagnose solely on my own issue would be to ignore the big picture and would assuredly lead to an incorrect diagnosis. And while the patient wasn't real or actually dying, I feel an obligation to use every resource necessary to ensure the correct diagnosis, due to some personal experiences where I witnessed the damages that an incorrect diagnosis could inflict on loved ones.

Anyways, the girl following my presentation wasn't very happy that she had to follow my act. The group already commented that they should have saved mine for last, so no one would have to present after me. She was doing a powerpoint presentation, and the images in her presentation were not working. I think she probably had linked to images that were on her computer in place of actually pasting them into the powerpoint. At any rate, the pictures were crucial to what she wanted to impress upon the class, and since they were not working, her presentation was more or less useless. The doctor had told her not to worry about it, technological issues happen, and he understood what she wanted to do since I had previously used the same kinds of images she wanted to use, and her explanations were good. Nonetheless, she clearly was upset. She was also one of the angriest members of the group after my presentation, and was clearly upset that she hadn't been able to do what I had done, and therefore didn't want to ever see anyone synthesize information in that fashion unless she did it.

At one point, during someone else's presentation, she abruptly got up and left the room. She returned around 15 minutes later, towards the end of class. When the doctor told everyone that they had done a great job, and that he was very pleased with us all, this girl just burst into tears and started blubbering like a little kid who had just injured themselves. At this point, everyone fortunate enough to be located away from her made a bolt for the exit, and avoided the awkwardness that followed. She was seated between myself and the doctor, and the doctor's response was to state, "Well, medical school can be stressful..." I was thinking to myself, "You're going to be dealing with patients in the future. Grow the hell up, when something doesn't go your way, don't just cry about it. Learn from it and do something about it." I mean really, your powerpoint runs into technical difficulties and you made the wrong diagnosis. Just make sure the powerpoint works in the future, and be happy you didn't misdiagnose a real patient, and then try to think of where you went wrong in your thought process to ensure that next time, you'll do better. Everyone makes mistakes (myself included, hard as it may be to believe). How someone responds to their mistakes is a true testament to their integrity, maturity, and character.

I don't know what to say about how she acted. Such immaturity at this age is simply inexcusable. No one said anything that was even remotely critical of her and her work. Just makes me wonder how crazy my classmates really are.