notageek

Because I am getting SO OLD, it’s been about 10 years since I was last in a Spanish language class. I took a year of Japanese, a year of German, and a medical Spanish class, but since then my language skills have been mostly atrophying.

Then my husband wanted to go to Ecuador. So here I am, a pharmacist who supposedly speaks Spanish, in the middle of a pharmacy, and I can barely get a Ventolin inhaler. I picked up a novel that looks fairly interesting, and after several intense hours of frowning at it, I’ve gotten through the prologue. I downloaded an audio version of Tales of the Brothers Grimm last year, thinking it might be a good brush-up for my receptive language skills.

HA. Maybe if I slowed it by a factor of 4. I have to fix this. This is crap.

I had a delightful encounter while I was stuck in the pharmacy by myself the other day.

Young gentleman and his mother came up to my counter with a new prescription. Mother realized she didn’t have the insurance card and ducked off to call the dad to ask him to fax it in. Young gentleman and I filled out his patient profile, including allergies, current medications and insurance carrier, and then his dad’s fax came in. I verified the profile information with his mom, and everything was correct. And he spoke clearly and he was patient and polite.

And he was 13. I have 21-year-olds who can’t do that. Hell, I have 35-year-old patients who can’t do that.

I’m forming a theory on culinary similarities between Southern China and the Southern US. I’ve covered the Chinese obsession with some of the pork products before, but tonight I made a very traditional Cantonese sweet-potato dessert soup. It contained sweet potatoes, jujube fruits, ginger and brown sugar.

It tasted like sweet potato pie.

Also, Cantonese-style mooncakes taste an awful lot like pecan pie. And why do we also make sweet-sauced roasted pork?

Some of the similarities are undoubtedly due to economy—mom’s parents are from some kind of Toi San hicksville—and climate. But still, it’s kind of weird. Maybe I need to eat more Southern food.

I wish someone had told me how medical teams at hospitals are structured, given that they are the units in which most pharmacy students end up on hospital rotations. Well, and as a corollary, I now wish I’d known how physicians are educated, because they call the shots on most hospital rotations.

From what I’ve gleaned, MDs have two academic years followed by two years of rotations, which are roughly homologous with pharmacy APPEs; graduation from medical school yields licensed but inexperienced physicians, who are seasoned with several years of residency before being unleashed upon an unsuspecting public.

Medical students are termed M1 through M4 and residents R1 through R3 and up, though first-year residents are usually called “interns”, and being a drug slug I didn’t meet anyone claiming a designation of R4. At that point of specialization, doctors may have taken monastic vows and withdrawn from public view, or acquired new titles that don’t indicate how long they’ve been plugging at this ridiculous endeavor. Readers in the pharmacy field may recall being called P1s our first year of pharmacy school and then not caring because we spend so little time in clinical environments that we don’t have the same clear labelling requirements.
The hierarchy of the medical team at teaching hospitals is arranged by who has the most clinical experience, which is logical. What I found so baffling is how much each person shits on the people below them in the hierarchy. Not all teams engage in this behaviour, and it varies by institution, but as the pharmacy student, your entire team has carte blanche to shit on you. You might be able to shit on a couple of the nurses or healthcare assistants, but I don’t recommend it, because your allies are pretty sparse.

This is the basic structure I saw in my inpatient rotations:

• Attending physician (“the attending”). The medical analogue of our preceptors. Has been working in the field several years, and often an unfathomably long time.
  • Medical resident, who looks after things while the attending isn’t around; seems like usually an R3.
    • Interns; it seems like there’s usually two of them so they can take turns staying up all night looking after patients.
      • 1 or more medical students, either third-year or fourth-year
  • Your pharmacist preceptor
    • Pharmacy resident, if a resident is not occupying the pharmacist role on the team
      • You. Ha. All the way down here. Seriously, don’t piss off the nurses.

I have a touch of the lung-gunk (a technical term), which is ordinarily no trouble for me to fight off in a weekend, except that earlier this week I sneezed while bending over to grab a stock bottle and stretched something unstretchable in the vicinity of my sacrum. So if I use the nice, vigorous cough to bring up all this lung-gunk the way I usually do, then I throw my back out more.

Also, because I do not have enough yarn in my life, I’m taking a wheel-spinning class from one of the local purveyors of fiber crack yarn shops. I got to sign out one of their shop-owned wheels on which to do my homework, momentarily terrifying my husband, who has only recently resigned himself to the eventual appearance of yarn-related furniture. At least I can spin without throwing my back out.