Young Medics : Rabbits in the Headlights

For one of the first times at the hospital, I felt like I wasn't the lowest link on the food chain. Of course, the doctors are higher than me. The nurses too, generally know more about medicine and are better respected. The patients are exempt from classification, and hell, even the cleaners get paid. But there is one group of individuals that make even my command of the caring profession look masterful; first and second year medics. They tiptoe around the wards, following their doctor in a perfectly obedient line, holding the door open for anything that moves. God forbid, if someone or something enters a corridor that they happen to be waiting on, they leap up against the wall and wait for the danger (or maintenance man) to pass. As for patients, they treat them like a medusa made from glass. Get to close, and you'll turn to stone. And for Christ's sake don't handle them too clumsily, or they'll shatter. As I watch the herd of medics pass by, a put the drug chart back on the end of the patient's bed, casually but politely tell her to take care and realise for a second that maybe I actually have learnt a few things.
After the ward round, for which I clerked and presented a gentleman with myasthenia (muscle weakness to the face and tongue), I felt pretty good. I was complimented, unusually for me, on the clarity of my presentation. And the patient even told the consultant that he enjoyed speaking to the "young gentleman". Bloody hell!
Lecture on respiratory failure followed, where I failed to understand the same single essential diagram on the subject for the ninth consecutive time.
After lunch I went for an interview with an anaesthetic consultant, discussing the possibility of me undertaking a research study devised by him for my fourth year study. We spend the fourth year mostly writing a lengthy research paper, and around this time we have to apply for positions with different doctors to do their chosen ideas. My first interview was based around the concept of me convincing people to sleep for 28 straight nights in an oxygen-decreased tent. Their haemoglobin would be measured each week, to check for increase. Hopefully this increase in haemoglobin is useful for upcoming surgery patients, to limit the need for transfusions. It would definitely be a unique study amongst my peers, and probably very interesting. I'll see what I can glean from my other up coming interviews, which include studies based on stem cell research and DNA cancer vaccines.
In the late afternoon, I had a casual two hours writing up another page of my essay and being lightly quizzed by an F1 doctor on mesothelioma, a type of asbestos-induced lung cancer that attacks the pleura. She also took me to see an abdominal ultrasound, quick and easy to understand. A good doctor and a good teacher, I'll be sure to hang around her a bit more in the future.