I hate cleaning. It’s tedious and boring. It’s dirty work. It makes my dry skin worse. It’s highly overrated as a form of therapy. I do try to stay clean myself, except maybe for my teeth. Let’s just say that I have so much tartar my fish sticks don’t need shit.
But the absolute worst cleaning jobs I've ever had to do were in medical school. In between my second and third years I did a student fellowship in Pathology. This involves functioning as a first year resident in the Pathology department - in other words I became a temporary intern a couple of years before I would finally go on to do a regular internship like everyone else entering a specialty. It seemed like a good deal to me because I would be paid during the year and it provided an opportunity to consolidate all the information that I had to absorb from my first two years of school. Plus, I had been a lab tech prior to entering med school, and I thought I wanted to become a Pathologist (they're the docs who run medical labs). Doing the student fellowship would allow me to get a leg up on the five year residency required if I did choose to go into Pathology, since it would count as my first year.
There were three student fellows, and we had all the duties of the regular interns entering their Pathology residencies. After some general orientation, I reported to the Pathology department on my first day, to find I had been assigned to the autopsy service. I was required to perform a total of 30 over the course of the year.
I guess I had some vague idea before taking the fellowship that autopsies would be involved but I never considered what they might actually be like. "Grisly" is the adjective that immediately comes to my mind when I remember doing them. My very first one was on a newborn who had lived for 20 minutes. He had come out of the womb blue and the delivery team became more and more frantic as all the usual techniques to get a newborn to start oxygenating properly weren't working. Then they tried intubating the baby but no one could get the tube inserted and the child succumbed. At autopsy we found that he had an extremely rare condition called laryngeal atresia, in which the windpipe doesn't form an a tube, instead it's blocked by a bar of cartilage.
Sorry - I've sort of gotten off the topic of cleaning. In medical training, interns get all the shit jobs, and this turned out to literally be true in Pathology. I was assigned an upper-level resident to work with and they accompanied me for my first few autopsies. The worst job is called "running the bowel", and the intern "gets" to do this. It involves taking scissors and opening the entire 20 feet of small intestine and five feet of large intestine, looking for anomalies. The residue in the small intestine was all liquid and aside from the odor it didn't impede the process. The hardest part was picking through all the attached fat, looking for lymph nodes.
The large intestine, however, was a different story. There was always a massive amount of shit adhering to its walls and it was truly loathsome to clean all this out, though I did eventually kind of get used to it. But afterwards, no matter how long I showered I never could seem to feel really clean. For me the hardest thing was getting the smell of formaldehyde out of my nose.
But the autopsy service doesn't have to be all grim, if you're resourceful - for example, when a colleague is performing an autopsy a remotely controlled electronic fart machine strategically fastened underneath the autopsy table can provide tons of fun!
But the absolute worst cleaning jobs I've ever had to do were in medical school. In between my second and third years I did a student fellowship in Pathology. This involves functioning as a first year resident in the Pathology department - in other words I became a temporary intern a couple of years before I would finally go on to do a regular internship like everyone else entering a specialty. It seemed like a good deal to me because I would be paid during the year and it provided an opportunity to consolidate all the information that I had to absorb from my first two years of school. Plus, I had been a lab tech prior to entering med school, and I thought I wanted to become a Pathologist (they're the docs who run medical labs). Doing the student fellowship would allow me to get a leg up on the five year residency required if I did choose to go into Pathology, since it would count as my first year.
There were three student fellows, and we had all the duties of the regular interns entering their Pathology residencies. After some general orientation, I reported to the Pathology department on my first day, to find I had been assigned to the autopsy service. I was required to perform a total of 30 over the course of the year.
I guess I had some vague idea before taking the fellowship that autopsies would be involved but I never considered what they might actually be like. "Grisly" is the adjective that immediately comes to my mind when I remember doing them. My very first one was on a newborn who had lived for 20 minutes. He had come out of the womb blue and the delivery team became more and more frantic as all the usual techniques to get a newborn to start oxygenating properly weren't working. Then they tried intubating the baby but no one could get the tube inserted and the child succumbed. At autopsy we found that he had an extremely rare condition called laryngeal atresia, in which the windpipe doesn't form an a tube, instead it's blocked by a bar of cartilage.
Sorry - I've sort of gotten off the topic of cleaning. In medical training, interns get all the shit jobs, and this turned out to literally be true in Pathology. I was assigned an upper-level resident to work with and they accompanied me for my first few autopsies. The worst job is called "running the bowel", and the intern "gets" to do this. It involves taking scissors and opening the entire 20 feet of small intestine and five feet of large intestine, looking for anomalies. The residue in the small intestine was all liquid and aside from the odor it didn't impede the process. The hardest part was picking through all the attached fat, looking for lymph nodes.
The large intestine, however, was a different story. There was always a massive amount of shit adhering to its walls and it was truly loathsome to clean all this out, though I did eventually kind of get used to it. But afterwards, no matter how long I showered I never could seem to feel really clean. For me the hardest thing was getting the smell of formaldehyde out of my nose.
But the autopsy service doesn't have to be all grim, if you're resourceful - for example, when a colleague is performing an autopsy a remotely controlled electronic fart machine strategically fastened underneath the autopsy table can provide tons of fun!
A good start. Perhaps choose one of the topics you raised and expand on the causes or effects this has had in your life.
ReplyDeleteDone!
DeleteThere you go! Winner for most disgusting imagery. And people think a doctor's life is all glamor and golf courses.
DeleteWell done! Wow just wow. I’m impressed that you did all this and lived to tell this story. See Chris is so right-no one else can tell your story!
ReplyDelete