Random Thoughts Post-Exam

I've discovered the key to excellent pesto sauce. I've made and eaten a lot of pesto in the firehouse. My favorite can be found at the Nob Hill Cafe in San Francisco, in -oddly enough- Nob Hill. Yesterday I experiemented. The secret ingredient is a little bit of cream. Yes, in addition to the olive oil and sausage. And Italians are slimmer than Americans? Hard to believe. It must be the wine. Also, the key to making good cranberry sauce from scratch is not necessarily adding more sugar, but a little orange juice. Of course, that has sugar in it too, but the OJ adds a little sumpm-sumpm.

My genetics professor really pissed me off. Today was the final exam. Her spelling and grammar were insultingly bad throughout the course - in the handouts and in the presentations. She didn't know how to punctuate either, and sometimes it would convolute the meaning of the sentence. If we are being held to such high academic standards, then the professors should be held to even higher standards. Medical school is supposed to be the pinnacle of higher education, so it's depressing that the faculty can't even spell. AND, she's from Britain! It's her first language! They're supposed to be the originators of the freakin' language! Rrrrgh. Poor spelling really makes a person look either stupid or lazy.

There are no good music stores in Orange County to go buy sheet music for my violin. The music library at UC Irvine is a joke - they have no music librarian, and all the music that they have is tucked away in some corner at the top of the library. Cal has a whole building dedicated to music, with its own librarians. I miss Cal. I didn't appreciate it as much as I could have when I was actually a student there.

I wanted to drive to Napa this afternoon, but it's too far. There's no place like that here that's within an hour's drive, like Napa is to Oakland. So I drove around the endless concrete jungle for a while instead, looking for a musical instrument store. It was rather unsatisfying. I miss Northern CA.

On a happy note... for our fake patient exams last week, we conducted a physical on a normal person who didn't have medical problems. I didn't do the reading beforehand, so I was winging it. The doctor who oversees me and my partner asked some questions to which I had no answer. I let my partner answer those questions and chimed in for the ones I did know from background knowledge. My partner had done the whole reading about how to do a physical exam. He is a very precise, intelligent guy with somewhat businesslike, but good bedside manners - he said "please" and "thank you" every time he asked the patient to do something. During the session, I could tell that the man was bored and not so impressed with what was going on. At one point as the doctor was rambling on about some technique, I quietly asked the man, "How are you doing?" with a slight smirk on my face, because I thought that the whole situation was rather silly, too. When we were finished, the doctor didn't single me out by name, but he mentioned, "...and you should always say please and thank you when you do something to the patient. They really like that." I didn't say please and thank you every time I had the "patient" do something; in fact, I didn't give him much direction because we were repeating what my partner had just done, and he seemed intelligent enough to get it. Plus we both thought the whole situation was rather silly. At the conclusion of the exam, as my partner and I were about the leave the room, the man asked, "What did you do before you came to school?" Taken aback, I told him I was a firefighter. "Paramedic?" he added. "Yes... You're good! How...?" He looked at me over his glasses and said, "It's the way you interact with people, the way you carry yourself. Keep up the good work." I know that there is more to being a good doctor than being a whiz in biochemistry, but sometimes you lose the forest for the trees. It was a nice reminder.