dreams of ships and sealing-wax

So I've been having a series of really odd dreams.
And by odd I mean mind-numbingly mundane.

Wednesday night: I was in the student book center looking for a calendar/day planner. They didn't have one I wanted. I called my friend for emergency calendar-buying assistance. She came and helped me look. We couldn't find a good one. I woke up.

How is that a dream???? Medical school has made me so boring that my deepest darkest fantasy life involves shopping for school supplies.

The strange part is that I don't even use a calendar or a planner. Since my life at this point consists of wake up, go to hospital, wander around hospital looking for the doctor who's supposed to be supervising, convince nurse on duty that said doctor does in fact exist and work in her ward, find doctor who was unaware that we were coming and taking a coffee break, convince doctor to briefly abandon coffee and teach us something, poke patients, go to gym, study, sleep- there doesn't seem much point in writing it all down.

The rest of my dreams this week have been about the same: one involved grocery shopping and looking for purple grapes, one involved studying, one involved mopping my apartment.

And class is provided plenty of fodder for interesting dreams. We spent hours yesterday looking at pictures of spiders stuck in ears, fractured eye sockets, missing noses, face-eating tumors. So much material there brain!



Our rounds in the wards continue to be a little upsetting. This is even more striking since we had an absolutely incredible doctor on Tuesday. She made sure to give each patient some kind of reassurance, to rub their back, to take a look at their bruises. . . I can't even figure out how she did it, but she managed to include the patients in her presentation on them. So instead of standing and taking notes on the patients as though they're some exotic zoo animals, it felt like a conversation. She introduced us by name, and then she'd say "tell us about your surgery" or "do you mind showing them your scar?" and when she did give us mini-lectures she'd make sure to stop and ask the patient if she was getting it right or if they had anything to add and the patients just lit up and were so eager to answer our questions and to tell us about their interesting heart sounds. It was really lovely. It made us feel like even as we were learning we were caring for the patients at the same time. And wow, what a different experience from the rest of these two weeks.


Then on Wednesday we were back to normal. We started calling our doctor "living-dead-doctor" I'm not sure why other than the fact that he is in fact the living dead. He has one of those limps where one leg drags behind him. He speaks in a monotone so monotone that I'm not even sure it can be called a monotone. More of a notone, perhaps. He displays no facial expressions ever except one that vaguely looks like anger or disgust when patients speak or when we answer a question right.

None of that would matter except that I have never seen anybody who was such a champion of ignoring people's pain. First of all, he's supposed to let us do the exams and just supervise. Instead, we follow him around as he looks for patients with "interesting" findings. Then we stood around as he, without any prelude, without bothering to even look at the chart and find out what's wrong and what parts of them might hurt, would pull the patient's robe aside and start aggressively pointing out scars, skin markings, fat, bruises etc. Then he would do the most violent exam I have ever seen, often repeating maneuvers that caused the patient pain to make sure we could all see that the patients abdomen was tender, for example.

The last patient was a senile or delirious older woman in the intensive care unit. She was moaning and yelling in a language that none of us could understand and she kept batting away LDD's hands as he tried to show us her stomach mass. Which isn't surprising since he didn't even say hi, just went over, opened up her robe, pulled down her adult diaper and started prodding her. After about three minutes of wrestling a sick 90 year old so he could show us an "interesting" stomach mass (which he was unable to locate), he stopped and said, with a trace of his one facial expression (it was fleeting, but I do believe I saw it): "the patient is non-compliant so it is impossible to collect any physical findings."

At that point we had a moment of group ESP and even though it was an hour early, we told LDD that we felt we had learned enough for the day. And we left.

So clearly, there are plenty of interesting things for me to dream about. I mean, my professor is an actual zombie! Yet I dream about sharpening pencils and highlighting textbooks.

Makes sense.

An actual earwig: