The cardio final’s tomorrow.

So everyone tells me that it’s actually surprisingly hard to kill a patient.

This news is just as comforting to me as it is disconcerting to most patients (You should feel righteously indignant!  I support that.  I, too, would want any students treating me to have loftier goals than “try not to slay”) – because I sure as heck expected to know some cardiology by now.

Weirdly enough, I’m not actually worried about the test.  I think I actually managed to learn what I was supposed to, and I can tell you all about the physics of valvular disorders if you’d like, which you wouldn’t.

It’s more about the idea that real patients aren’t multiple choice questions, and I’m gonna throw out the wild guess that it’s harder to identify a “systolic crescendo-decrescendo murmur at the right upper-sternal border radiating to the carotids” than it is to finish that particular call-and-response with “aortic stenosis”.

So, yes.  Tomorrow, on to pulmonology!  A unit that is brand new in every sense except for the literal one, because we may have technically started it last week.  (They knew that none of us were going to watch those lectures until after the cardio test, right?   Because, see, they assigned us homework, and right now all I know about the lungs are that they are an annoying and seemingly unnecessary volume reservoir for the heart.)