Zaza gets pimped

Today I had my first experience with pimping. In case you’re unsure of my meaning, I will explain. Pimping is what doctors do to medical students or residents working with them: While doing a procedure or examining a patient, or even just while they happen to be walking by a random medical student, they will ask obscure questions on just about anything slightly related to the case and expect you to immediately give the right answer, and if you don’t, they will either yell at you or haul you in front of the other doctors to chew you out and laugh at you, and then proceed to ask you more questions about things you couldn’t possibly know.
The only way to stop pimping is to answer back with a better and more detailed answer than they were expecting, and after a while they’ll hopefully stop badgering you. Pimping exists to make sure that medical students go home from the hospital and spend the evening frantically looking up things in their textbooks so the next day they can answer intelligently and not make fools of themselves. It ensures that we learn our stuff well.
Anyway, for one of our classes today, we were split up into groups and sent to clinics in St. Johns where we would be assisting a physician and observing. Brendan and I were assigned to a very pleasant doctor in a dingy little examining room. We sat down after introductions and our first patient came in.
She was a 7-year-old girl with chickenpox, and the doctor started writing a prescription. He was talking to the mother of the child and I was kind of zoning out and suddenly I realized the doctor was talking to me.
“Would you prescribe Acyclovir for this patient or not?”
Oh my goodness, he was actually expecting me to respond. What the heck was Acyclovir? I suddenly remembered it was an anti-viral drug used for Shingles but as far as I could remember, it wasn’t usually indicated for a simple case of children’s chickenpox.
“Probably not.” I said hesitantly.
He turned back to his prescription. I looked at Brendan across the desk and he nodded, letting me know I had been right.
“So what’s the incubation period for chickenpox?” The doctor asked me again.
I took a deep breath and looking pleadingly at Brendan. Come on, help me out.
“Well….” I started to say slowly.
“14 days.” Brendan jumped in.
“Yes, about 14 days.” The doctor responded. “And how long before it’s contagious again?”
“About a week.” Brendan answered.
“It may be a week, but actually it’s no longer contagious when the lesions scab over and stop itching.”
The doctor then went into a long explanation about the stages of chickenpox and talked to the patient for a moment, and then asked,
“Can you get chickenpox more than once?”
“No.” Brendan said at the same time I said “Yes.”
The doctor swiveled in his chair to look at me.
“Why would you say that?”
“You can get Shingles as an adult.” I said, “Even if you’ve had chickenpox as a child. It’s caused by the herpes…”
“And where does it show up?” He demanded.
“Along your nerve tracts.” I answered, thinking, I sure hope I'm right.
Brendan jumped in. “And it mostly manifests on the trunk- the back and chest area.”
The doctor grunted in affirmation and turned back to the patient. Phew. Passed that round. Across the table Brendan and I gave each other panicked looks and supportive nods.
The next patient had a bad cough.
“Listen to his chest.” The doctor ordered.
“Ummm….”
“You didn’t bring stethoscopes?” The doctor looked from the two of us incredulously. “I can’t believe you didn’t bring stethoscopes. Always bring them with you so you’re prepared.”
Prepared? I thought, I’ll never be prepared for this. There’s way too much to know.
Our next patient had a complex set of symptoms and we struggled to try to understand his vague replies, the doctor’s thick accent, and the jumble of notes and tests that he’d had done.
“What do you think about these hematocrit levels?” The doctor demanded.
I wondered what normal hematocrit levels were and if I could bluff my way out of having to answer.
“Well….”
“They look fairly normal.” Brendan said, and then I noticed next to the column of numbers, anything that was abnormal was labeled as ‘low’ or ‘high’.
I would have to remember that for next time.
Man, oh man. There were more questions over the next couple of hours, and we sat on the edge of our seats desperately hoping to get them right. I learned a lot today, and one of the things I learned was, when it comes to pimping, it’s all about survival. It’s about answering the doctor’s questions and then getting home and searching through my books and hoping that next time I know what the doctor is asking and can give the right answer. We met up with the rest of our class and all of us had been grilled the same way, and on the ride home we laughed about it and filled in the blanks of what we hadn't known. Next time. Good thing there's always a second chance to get it right.