The gas barrier

Where to start, where to start? I have so much to write/brag/bitch about. Well, it’s mostly bitching, but that’s no surprise; it’s really what I’m best at. I’m feeling very relaxed having just returned from a weekend in Vermont at Minerva’s family vacation house. I’ll break this post down into vignettes:

The saga of the scrubs:
Last year I was chosen to be on the board of our school’s Emergency Medicine Society (EMS). The EMS is simply our little interest group where we hold events about the specialty. As a member of the 4 member board, I am responsible for organizing events and scheduling physicians to be at them and various and sundry other crappy obligations that go along with the job. One of these jobs is to run the annual fund raiser that the EMS puts on. This fundraiser is simple, the EMS sells scrubs (those green pajama-like uniforms that nurses and physicians wear) to the first year students. The first year students traditionally wear them in anatomy lab because 1) everything that goes into anatomy lab comes out smelling like a cadaver and better it be a set of cheap scrubs than your new Lacoste polo with the freshly popped collar, and 2) they want to look just like real doctors and wear scrubs. So here’s the strategy: first years order scrubs from me, I assemble these small orders into a large mega-order and get a bulk discount, I then charge the first years slightly less per set of scrubs than they would pay if ordering independently yet more than I pay for the bulk order. Nothing could be simpler, right? In walks the US Postal service. There were 11 boxes in the shipment of 352 sets of scrubs. I received 10 boxes and one little 3x5 index card telling me that I had to go to the post office to get #11. I figured it was a small pain in the ass, but at least they all showed up somewhere, so I went to get the final box. On my third visit to the post office, they finally admitted that they had no idea where the box was. On my way home from the post office that same day, I got a voice mail message that says the box has been located and is ready for pickup at the post office I WAS JUST AT. So the next day I go back to the post office and show them the little card, they go in the back for another 20 min and finally come back to tell me that the box is out for delivery to my house. Then they ask me if I will be at my house to take delivery.

I ask “when?”
They say “now.”
I say “I am here now, how can I be there now?”
They say “That’s OK, the delivery person will leave a little 3x5 card and…”
Then I make the New York Times afternoon edition in which my friends describe me as a normally quiet guy who kept to himself a lot.

The Devil
About 2 weeks ago we took our first of two Nervous System and Human Behavior exams. The exam, she was a bitch. We, as a class, did not do as well as usual. Minerva, Aladdin (Minerva’s boyfriend) and I also did not do as well as we normally do. We didn’t fail or anything, but relative to the amount of work we put in and our self-perceived level of understanding of the material, we did poorly. On all of our exams we have attached to it what is referred to as the “ambiguity sheet”. This is the area in which we have an opportunity to let the course faculty know about questions we found hard to interpret or were otherwise shitty. Many, many students filled out the ambiguity sheet for this exam. I can only imagine that reading these sheets was a lot like that scene in “Good Morning Vietnam” where they read all the hate mail Lt. Hauk gets after he takes over for Adrian Cronauer. “ ’Hey, Hauk. Eat a bag of shit. You suck.’ Now that's pretty much to the point, sir, not much gray area in this one.” So the course leader decided to reply to these constructive criticisms and prove just what a douchebag he really is. Here are some excerpts:

Someone raised a question as to why we were testing on a historical theory that is now obsolete. One of the problems with multiple choice questions is it is very difficult to write questions that test "important knowledge" without giving the knowledge away and thus making the quesiton (sic) important but trivial to answer. And it is very easy to write a question that is of trivial importance that is hard to answer.

Guess which difficulty option he went with.

About half the ambiguity comments showed not that you didn't understand the question because it was ambiguous but rather that you didn;t (sic) understand the question because you didn't understand the material.

You’re right, just like when someone makes a shitty movie, it’s the audience’s fault.

The fact that you were given the final diagnosis should just have reinforced what I have said many times; it isn't about getting the right answer, it's about having a list of possibilities that include the right answer.

Is it too much to ask that your multiple choice questions have a list of possibilities that include the right answer?

We hope peer pressure and cooperation will work where testing falls short.

And here I was hoping for a cogent presentation of the material coupled to clear educational objectives.

I’m a little unhappy because I truly enjoy the material in this class. It’s probably my favorite class information-wise of all my med school classes so far. However, the course leader is such a perfect jack-ass that it ruins what should be a terrific experience. His ass-clownery has even drawn the ire of one of the other course faculty members who now refers to him and the other co-leader of the course as “the axis of evil” and to him specifically as “the devil”.

Getting comfy with friends

I have written about Minerva and Aladdin before in this blog. She was my anatomy lab partner and is also my general study partner. Aladdin is her boyfriend and also studies with us. The three of us went up to Vermont this weekend to hang out at Minerva’s family vacation house. It’s beautiful up there.

The weekend consisted of apple picking, cooking, drinking, cheese tasting, drinking, hiking, watching "The Office", and drinking. Minerva and Aladdin took the opportunity of showing how close we all have grown as friends by breaking the gas barrier. The gas barrier is the point in a friendship where open flatulence becomes acceptable. The real problem lies in the fact that I am famously shy about gas. There are very few people with whom I have felt comfortable enough to stray from the very best in gas control behavior. I am simply not there yet these two yet. Now, after the weekend, I am pretty sure that humans were not intended to consume, within a 24 hour period, grass-fed beef chili, asparagus, crab bisque, gorgonzola cheese, artichokes, tilapia fillets, apple crisp with vanilla ice cream, and copious amounts of double-brown ale. At the very least you should not consume these with other humans who ignore the gas barrier.

And finally, just for Joe:


















I like what I’m seeing in your blog pics.