April 7, 2003

Today is the day to get one of those sackswith a dollar sign on them.

Introducing Dr. Hot Pants

I am friends with an extremely bright, extremely good looking young lady who just happens to be in medical school. Thanks to her, I am privy to a lot of information, which ranges from good, hard-hitting medical tidbits from "Don't drink cold water on an upset stomach" to "Gonorrhea can cause knee infections." The best part, though, is the cheerful way she delivers these medical curiosities. Observe some of her best:

"I just went to a microbiology "review" and got completely freaked out. Sample question- "An 8 year old kid ate some hamburger and got bloody diarrhea for 2 days. What does he have?" answer "hemolytic uremia caused by e. coli 0157:e7/ enterhemorrhagic e.coli." Aaaaaaaaahhhhhh!!!!!! I just reviewed bacteria over the weekend and I DEFINITELY did not know that."

"Hey Claire! I just gave my first pap smear. Well, I'm going to go wash my hands, now. Bye!"

"I was at a bar after anatomy lab one day, smelling like a cadaver and looking extremely wiped out when some guy came up to me and asked what was wrong. I told him that I had just gotten finished disemboweling somebody's dead grandma and was a little bit tired."

"Today we had a patient who was injecting herself with her own feces!"

"This poor guy got shot eight times in his genital area including through the urethra, if you can imagine such a thing, right under the prostate. But the most interesting thing about him was that he referred to his entire genital region as "dude"-- as in, 'the guy was aiming for DUDE!! and he just missed!' And, since we have to use the patient's own words when reporting the chief complaint, we now get to stand up in front of a roomful of people and say 'Mr. X. is a 21-year old man who suffered eight gunshot wounds to his 'dude'.' Medicine: what a fantastic job."

"Medical quotations of the day for you, courtesy of our class on exactly how to do a genital exam:
1) 'Could you please hold your penis out of the way?'
2) 'Here are some tissues for your anus.'"

"Things have been a little crazy around here but I just finished working at the hospital yesterday so I should have at least 8 more hours a week free, which makes me very happy. That, and not having to deal with anybody with an infection so serious that pus is actually oozing through their skin while they talk."

Since the good doctor in training is such a delight and such a font of knowledge, I thought that I should share her resources with you, my Zulkey.com readers. Thus, I'd like to begin a new feature at Zulkey.com: "Ask Dr. Hot Pants." (We are using a pseudonym due to the fact that she wants to maintain her professionalism.)

What do you want to know? Starve a fever? Feed a cold? Why does your pee smell funny after you eat asparagus? What happens if you leave a tampon in for a month?

If you have a medical question, send me an email with the subject line reading "Hot pants." I will forward the mail to the doctor and she will answer them (that is, if she knows the answers: she's not a doctor yet) the best she knows how. And, whenever she has time, since apparently medical school is 'hard.'

Yeah, sure, she might be administering shots and making people healthy and working on corpses but has she ever been unemployed? That's really tough.