Unleashed.

As part of my medical school experience, we get sent out in pairs to schools in the community. Our roles and responsibilities are somewhat vague, leaving my partner and I landing in front of a class of grade 7 students, unsure of what to anticipate. For the first while, I was the "show-and-tell".. they oooed and ahhhed when we walked in, they asked all sorts of insightful questions "do you, um.. you know.. get grossed out when they do surgery and there's lots of blood and guts everywhere?" (I don't know yet) .. "can you teach us how to give needles?" (no.. i still haven't learned!).. "What made you decide to become a doctor" (they got the condensed answer).. "what time in the morning do you start class?".. Soon enough the novelty wore off and we became just an extra set of "adult" bodies in the classroom, helping the kids with their spelling and math homework. I haven't yet become comfortable with strangers being impressed when I tell them I'm in medical school, and I truly hope that by the end of my four years of school, I still feel this way (just to a lesser extent). Today was really my first time let out "in public" playing the role of the medical student, and I think I passed. Now if only passing my anatomy exam were that easy...

If It Isn't One Thing....

I seem to have bad luck when it comes to cleaning my apartment. I usually manage to either burn myself (see previous post: "A Warning about Warning Labels), create a sort of mini-flood, break something, or cut myself. Today I decided to take initiative and clean my kitchen (just a simple sweep and mop.. or so I thought). I successfully managed to get the kitchen clean without any major mishaps, and went to go pour out the mop bucket into the toilet. As I poured the liquid, I suddenly noticed/remembered there had been a rag in the mop bucket. As I went to grab for it, the toilet flushed itself and my rag disappeared into the black hole of the toilet bowl. For the time being, I'm just short one rag.. but I'm quietly anticipating some sort of gurgle-and-explosion from the distant recesses of toilet-world. Anything else just wouldn't make sense.

Sounds like...

Have you ever had an experience where you mis-hear something, except that you don't know that you mis-heard because your interpretation, although perhaps bizarre, is still entirely possible? During a lecture today, my classmate turned to me and complained that his stomach was hurting because he had eaten a "pinata" for lunch. I started to ask if his stomach hurt because he had eaten the outside (balloon part) of the pinata but he couldn't hear what I was saying. At the next break in the lecture I turned to him incredulously and asked "did you really eat a pinata for lunch??" He said yes. "Balloon and all??," I asked. He looked confused for a moment and then said "OH!! no no, not a pinata, an empanada!". I have since learned that an empanada (with the "n" pronounced the same "gn" way as in "pinata") is a Spanish turnover/pastry usually filled with a spicy or sweet filling.
All things considered... I guess they're both tasty..

The rib bone is connected to the...

Instead of dissection, today in anatomy lab we learnt surface structures of the chest. This involved most of the guys in the group taking off their shirts, some markers and stethoscopes. We tried to keep a serious tone, but there's certainly something humorous about labeling the locations of inside structures (heart, lungs, etc) on the outside of my classmates. One of the guys remarked that his wife "would certainly be in for a surprise tonight..".

A Warning about Warning Labels.

I pride myself on being a relatively intelligent human being. So when I went to clean the oven in my new apartment the other day, I did what intelligent people do: I read the warning label on the can of oven cleaner BEFORE proceeding. I read that I needed to wear gloves while applying the oven cleaner, that I had to be careful not to breathe in deeply while cleaning, and to avoid spraying outside the oven. Seemed like reasonable warnings. On went the gloves, I sprayed and sprayed (and choked a little), and then shut the oven door. I waited the requisite 20 minutes, grabbed a roll of paper towel and wiped out the icky foamy mess that the inside of the oven had become. 15 minutes into the wiping-out process an unpleasant feeling began to spread across my hands.. and I looked down and realized I had forgotten to put the gloves back on. You see, the warning label ended with the closing of the oven door and COMPLETELY failed to mention putting on gloves (or keeping on your gloves) for the wiping out part of the oven-cleaning procedure. Sure, as a relatively intelligent human being I should have been intelligent enough to realize that I should be wearing gloves the entire time.. but alas, I am merely "relatively" intelligent and clearly rely WAY too much on warning labels. As it turns out, it wasn't too severe of a chemical burn... I lost a few layers of skin over the course of a few days and now my hands are baby smooth. Lesson learned.