Sunday, October 18, 2009

Watching House as a med student

I watched my first episode of House (Season 5 - Episode 22 "House Divided") as a medical student. I think it was good timing being after midterms, because now I know just enough to catch some of the medical conversations, but not nearly enough to know what the hell is going on. It felt like trying to watch a film in a foreign language with only a year completed...The odd part was that there were two languages that I have very limited knowledge of presented in this episode: American Sign Language and, er, Medicalese...
In a way, it was more frustrating to watch the show because as the episode progressed I tried to figure out why the symptoms presented as they did:

Why can the deaf kid feel the boombox on his chest but not his arm? -- neuropathy is such a general answer!
They said Vagus and Phrenic nerve! And even mentioned hiccups with the phrenic! Yay thorax!
Eosinophilic something disease... I remember eosinophils...(meanwhile I miss 5 more lines of dialouge)

I soon realized there was no way I'd be able to do this.. this lead to my frustrated thoughts interfering with my ability to listen to the episode - which was a very good one... even the hallucination of dead cutthroat bitch was well done.
It was good to see myself progressing in my medicalese... and it gave me a bit of a better appreciation of the amount of work it will take to become truly fluent. Same goes for ASL.

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