Tuesday, May 11, 2010

At some point I must learn some medicine

[WARNING - THIS POST CONTAINS VIOLENCE, PROFANITY AND ... ADULT THEMES]

A doctor I was consulting with said to me, "You have to be an idiot savant to do medicine.  You can't be too bright."  I think he was trying to make me feel better about myself because I forgot to wear a belt today so my pants kept falling down.  However, he obviously also didn't think much of my memory because he then said, "Don't write that down."  Okay.

Later on, in a splendid demonstration of his own lack of savant powers, he forgot his Medicare prescriber number, which he has probably written down about a million times by now.  When he found it he said it didn't even look familiar.  So we got into a weird conversation about jamais vu, which I only know about because I read Catch-22 when I was younger but have become intimately familiar with in the last two and a half years.  It's a close cousin of déjà vu, which is French for "A big black bear" and also presque vu, which is not.  Anyway, me knowing about the vus seemed to impress him.  I think I'll stick with using literature rather than medicine to impress people, it seems like less work.

He swore a lot.  He said to me, "There's a lot of bad shit around in medicine.  Your colleagues will be so fucking lazy or inept or greedy that they'll diagnose disease that doesn't even fucking exist just so they can treat them and get paid."  His contempt wasn't reserved for doctors though.  He was talking about a patient who'd been to see a chiropractor and had been told that her brain pan was malaligned and needed manipulation, "and all that fucking bullshit crap."

I admire someone who can string three cusses together with a straight face.  It's really inspirational.  I think mastering that will help me a lot in my viva exam at the end of this fucking bullshit arse of a year.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Do the French have a word for cuss'n' using a profanity that you've not yet heard?

That would have been the ideal literary brain fart to have dropped on the profane doctor.

Anonymous said...

fledlism

perepe

These are some of my recent word verification tests from PTR. Is it just me, or do they seem a bit Lewis Caroll? There's an almost-credibleness to these words.

I'm sure that I'll soon get a word which is a made-up name of a fabulous sounding monster and then I'll write a wonderful poem.

Until then flockfky!

Anonymous said...

haha. Classic.

PTR said...

1. If the French don't, the Germans must. But I suspect it would be polysyllabic and involve a sputum cup.

2. And hast though fleddled the perepe? Come to my arms, my flockfky boy! Yeah, it works :)

3. New classics - that's what I strive for. Thanks!