i just spent the last 2 hours looking over a shoulder in a dark room, staring at pictures of alien landscapes and listening as they were discussed, with fervor, in the danish tongue.
ok, not really, but it might as well have been like that for all i have gotten out of my mornings on radiology thus far. i have no complaints about the schedule (hello, 30 hour work week!), but i am experiencing something that i haven’t felt so vividly since, maybe, my surgical rotation — i am sitting around just BECAUSE I AM SUPPOSED TO, as an ornament or something, and learning absolutely. freaking. nothing! i mean, i’m so bad at anatomy that it takes me 15 minutes to figure out which body part we’re even looking at, while the attendings/residents are enthusiastically debating the condition of the ‘labrum’. what the hell is a labrum? seriously. they are zooming in and out of 3D images that would make me WEEP if i ever had to truly make sense out of them, and therefore unless learning really can happen by osmosis (the ‘smart’ traveling out of the resident’s neurons and into mine), then it’s just very, very unlikely in this sort of situation.
our afternoons are much better. we have class that still moves too fast for my spatially-deficient brain, but at least i can pick up a few pointers and learn a few fancy radiological words (ground-glass reticular opacities anyone? although don’t ask me what this means) to throw around in the future.
obviously, the answer is to just stop going in the mornings but there’s this very stubborn medical-student guilt that fights this logical urge. i think, however, that a few more hours of useless boredom will be able to kick m-s guilt to the curb once an for all. just in time for graduation.
in other news, i just saw some bathroom graffiti (yes, in the hospital) that said, “osama luvs UR SUV.” ha.
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