Today marked the beginning of my ob/gyn clerkship. It involved me sitting in a small classroom for 8 hours that fluctuated between way too hot and way too cold listening to a plethora of lectures of female anatomy, incontinence, prolapse, normal & abnormal labor and the such. All the while trying not to blow my nose raw or cough up a lung... yay for an end of break cold. Tomorrow I get to do more of the same.
So far I have learned that an ob/gyn's ego is much smaller than a surgeon's. Multiple times we were told that "we know that nearly all of you will go into something besides ob" and "the point we want you to remember when you leave ob/gyn behind is..." This is compared to the surgeons who believed they were G!d's gift to man, and that we, medical students, would be absolutely crazy if we went into a specialty other than surgery. The feeble humbleness of the faculty today was a bit off putting. Also off putting was the story one attending told about killing a baby while showing us a picture of a ruptured ectopic pregnancy (no more than 6 or 7 weeks) that caused the woman to hemorrhage.
With all of the information they are giving us over these 2 days of standardized orientation, there has been no mention of birth control, family planning, or elective abortions. And there is no such lecture on the clerkship schedule as of now. NONE. This is not because family planning is irrelevant to the life of an ob/gyn... Simply a lovely reminder that I go to medical school in the conservative south.
2 comments:
Huh. At my medical school we had lectures on abortion, and we even had the option of participating in them to the level we were comfortable. I'm very thankful to be in a more tolerant and progressive part of the world.
It is highly possible that one day I'll be joining you up in the friendly north!
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