"Big white warning flags"

On each Tuesday, my school looses the 2nd year med students into the hospital wards to wreak havoc. The way it works is that we are assigned patients in pairs, we go to the patient's room, barge in, ask a million questions, grope and fondle, then meet with an attending physician to discuss what we didn't find. We know nothing. We're blind rats in a maze looking for odorless cheese that doesn't exist.

Last week I found a previously undiagnosed heart murmur in a patient. It was so faint that even the attending physician, with years and years of experience, could barely discern it. This week I saw another patient with an undiagnosed heart murmur and I missed it. This one was so loud and obnoxious that you could hear it just by walking in the room, with your iPod on, and your last name is Beethoven or Keller. Apparently last week I proved the blind squirrel and acorns theorem.

They make us wear white coats when we go to the hospitals. They only go down to your waist - the stigmata of the med student. Once you graduate, you get the full knee-length coat. One would suppose we wear these mini-skirt versions of lab coats to give the illusion to the patients that we are in fact some kind of pseudo doctor-like being. The four of us (2 pairs of students per attending Doc) in my hospital group have come up with an alternative hypothesis though. No other physicians in the hospital wear white coats anymore. Interns wear scrubs and clogs, residents wear khaki's, oxford shirts and brand-name running shoes, attendings wear Armani suits and Bruno Magli's. Med students wear big white polyester warning flags so that all the other MDs in the place are alerted to the fact that, if given any responsibility for patient care whatsoever, we will most surely kill. I'm beginning to understand why my school charters two small yellow buses to get us to the hospital from campus rather than one large bus.