How to tell you study medicine

Some of these are my own, some are my friends’, others have come from the internet. All of them are a reflection of being a medical student. Enjoy, laugh, and feel free to add some more below. 🙂

1.When you look at a person on the beach, the first thing you notice is their appendectomy scar.

2. You feel there is something wrong when you don’t have an exam coming up.

3. You wiz through a 500 page textbook in a day (which happens to be the day before your exam).

4. You know the size of a red blood cell: 7 microns in diameter

5. You are always tired.

6. You consider watching House or ER a legitimate study method.

7. You race to see if you can diagnose a patient before House M.D. does.

8. You have picked up mistakes in medical series like Grey’s Anatomy.

9. You have diagnosed yourself with a disease you were studying at the time.

 

10. You contemplate anything between dropping out and suicide after you finish each exam, even before knowing the results.

11. Your eyesight has worsened by at least 10 points in the last year

12. You find yourself always carrying a pen even if you are having a night out.

13. You don’t understand why summer holidays are only one month, although summer itself is three months.

14. People call you doctor – unless you are a female, in which case you are always “nurse”.

15. You don’t understand what people mean when they talk about that “hospital smell”.

16. You count the days until your next more-than-two-days-weekend, which is at least four months away.

17. You have used the phrase, “I am a doctor” to get out of trouble.

18. You are more familiar with the names Netter, Moore, Grant, Underwood and Talley than with the last names of your classmates.

19. You take forever explaining to people how long you will study for, and realise you will get your medical doctor title at the same time your friend gets a PhD-doctor title.

20. You get depressed and emotional just thinking about how bad a doctor you will be in a few years.

21. “You study medicine? Oh, what do you want to specialise in?” is an appropriate and everyday subject-matter.

22. Members of the opposite sex are intimidated by you by default when they hear you study medicine – before they get to know you.

23. You answer every question with, “Hmmmm [pretending to think for a second], I don’t know.” And you know the most correct answer is, “It depends, sir.”

24. You diagnose every single abnormality on yourself/family/friends as a life-threatening condition. You think the tiny haematoma on your finger is a risk for Pulmonary Embolism.

25. Your friend/cousin zooms in front of you with his brand new car and treats you to lunch with his own pay check and on top of that, talks about property and houses to buy. And you’re still struggling to buy second-hand text books.

26. You wash your hands after meals and the loo using sterile technique.

27. “SOB” means short of breath to you.

28. You wonder when you will have time to get married and start a family. Although after studying Obstetrics and Gynaecology, you are not sure you really want to do this in anyway.

29. At least half your classmates smoke.

30. All your non-medical friends know you party hardest because you have the least time to do it in.

31. You wonder why people are giving you weird looks as your friend explains the latest perverted mnemonic in a restaurant.

32. You can cut up cadavers and still eat a steak afterwards without changing your clothes.

33. You cut up dead bodies without fainting.

34. Getting a B is actually a great mark.

35. You often mumble to yourself, “F***! Am I supposed to know that?” as soon as you see or hear about some disease/symptom/sign that you don’t know from a bar of soap. Then you blame it on your university for not teaching you.

36. You were an A-student in high school. You now pray for exam entrance.

37. It does not matter if you are a 3rd or 6th year, people still ask  with horror whether you have already seen dead people (nobody seems to know that this happens during first year)

38. Your parents stop introducing you by name. They just say, “This is my daughter/son who goes to Medical School”.

40. Your find yourself telling people that you can’t go out on a Friday or Saturday night because you are on call.

41. The sun rises and you haven’t even gone to bed (and it’s not because you went out the night before).

42. It doesn’t matter how much you study, there is always so much more material to learn.

43. If you go out of town for the weekend, you take more books than clothes with you.

44. You drink more coffee than water during the day.

45. You learn of a war starting, after it ends.

46. You have eliminated the suffix –LOGY from your lexicon and speak of Histo, Physio, Micro, etc.

47. Your friends/relatives don’t understand your dirty jokes.
48. Your professor describes the kidney as being “kidney shaped“.

49. You feel a strange pride in having the part of your cadaver that you spent a good amount of time dissecting out tagged for the practical/uitkenning.

50. Sleep is just another 5-letter word in the dictionary.

51. You start to look at people’s arms and notice where the “good veins” are to start peripheral IVs.

52. When you buy shoes you consider things like how your back would feel after being in hospital all day, or whether they would make you slip on the hospital floors.