Foreign Sounding Doctor

So good news! I passed my first medical school course, ensuring that I am a little bit closer to becoming a medical doctor. That pressure, coupled with the fact that I wrote a 50,169 word novel in the month of November (for NaNoWriMo), is why I have neglected this blog for the most part. I really would like to get my novel published one day, as it was an attempt to make primary care physicians sexy. Improving people's opinions for primary care physicians is my primary goal.

Regardless, I would like to get back on point. Yesterday all the first year students, across all the disciplines, had our HMTD course (nobody knows what HMTD stands for). We were split up in groups, and my group got to hear from a man in his seventies who had had a hemorrhagic stroke about five years ago. A doctor, a pharmacist, and a physical therapist talked to him about his recovery since the incident. The doctor was my community leader, Dr. Senno. Dr. Senno is a really loud man, a neurologist who deals with traumatic brain injuries. He also has an accent of medium thickness (which means its detectable, but you can understand pretty much everything he says).

At one point, he began talking about how easy it is to develop a rapport with your patient--asking the man questions pertaining to the day (it was Pearl Harbor Day), the man's hobbies, the man's career. When it was discovered that the patient and his first doctor treating him during and after his stroke had both gone to the same undergraduate institution, Dr. Senno had noted that he had done rotations at the very same hospital. Dr. Senno then proceeded to go on a tangent about how important it is, especially for doctors with foreign sounding last names, to establish credentials.

Should I change my last name? What would I change it to? No. I like my last name, even if people tend to pronounce it as Abandagu, even though my last name is phonetical and clearly Apantaku. It scares people. I don't want to scare people. But things should change, if only because the majority of the students in my class aren't white. But until then, I guess I could be Dr. A.

MANDATORY

In undergrad, I helped organize events for our Biological Honor Society, TriBeta. One of these events was the Chili Cook Off, and to get people excited about the event, I created a ton of flyers that made the event seem mandatory for select groups of students who might be Biology majors:

MANDATORY for all students enrolled in Physics 101 who would rather not be.

MANDATORY for all students going abroad to either Uganda or Costa Rica next semester.

MANDATORY for all students who know what Isoamyl Acetate smells like.

MANDATORY for all students who are Nolan Sheppard.

One of the fourteen or so different flyers I made caused a lot of problems, however. It read:

MANDATORY for all pre-med students.

The professor who organized TriBeta got an angry cease and desist e-mail from the women who organized the pre-meds. The reason? She was getting a lot of e-mails from freaked out students asking whether or not they had to attend. A lot. Our professor told us to immediately remove the flyers. I was saddened. If people had just been logical, they would have realized that not only did it make no sense for TriBeta to have the authority to interfere with pre-med going ons, but that the high variability in the signs would suggest that there was no way the event could be mandatory. Sarcasm in print is hard to understand, yes, but it should be easy to understand if you get a lot of helpful hints. Or even if you just think with a discerning mind. I wanted to scribble on the flyers, "Relax STIFFS!" Thankfully, I did not. I just removed them, defeated.

Later our professor told me that he thought they were very amusing, but, leave it to the pre-med students to be driven into a tizzy by clearly humorous signs (he was an ecology professor).

I now go to medical school, and these people I am surrounded by, many of them behave with the same freaked-out tizziness of the pre-med students from my young adulthood. It is hexing. But also pretty funny. I wonder if I could increase readership by putting up signs around Rosalind Franklin University that read:

"LESS THAN CLINICAL" is MANDATORY READING FOR ALL M1s.