Rant and Roll

My first major exam is this week, in my pathophysiology class. We've covered a lot of ground in class, so despite the studying I've done, I've still got more than half of the material to review before Thursday. Sigh.

I had an interesting class on Thursday, though. I corrected the instructor on something and it caused him to do a slow-motion kind of burn. He couldn't let himself get miffed in front of the class, but you could tell it stayed with him because he brought it up three more times during class. (The lecture is three hours long.) When I got home, I emailed him a question and got five long paragraphs in response two hours later; he had already looked up the reference I had cited in class. So that was fun.

It's good to be an older student because it's not like I'm afraid to challenge an instructor and I'm not remotely intimidated by them either. (Not that I ever much was, but I used to avoid open disagreement in class, whereas now I don't. It's probably not the most diplomatic approach, but this instructor has said that he likes discussion in class, so let's see how long he'll let that line reel out when it's not just him doing the talking.)

And talk he does. I've started, as part of my regular note taking, keeping track of the number of times he brings up personal matters, personal stories, or gives personal information. In the last class--one class!--he spent the first 10 minutes talking about how his class policies are shaped by former students and how he used to be a nice guy and make lots of exceptions, but students walked all over him so he changed. Fair enough.

Twenty minutes later, he was ranting about people think it's expensive to eat healthy food but you can buy brown rice and frozen vegetables at Wal-mart. Then he told us how he was a math genius as a kid.  Somewhere in there was a rant about fad dieting and a review of the great three mile run he had that morning. And how his knees are shot and he's getting turkey neck even though his BMI is great because he's going to be 55 this year. (He mentions that a lot.) That was followed up by a story about a patient from India who he cared for at some hospital in Chicago, his very first patient, who died after running a fever of 107 for four days.  Then there was a rant about red meat and soy derivatives and pre-workout drinks and energy drinks. Then he told us for about the hundredth time about how he went to both law and medical school.

We had moved on to covering genetic disorders, so he told us about genetic disorders in his family, and mentioned how his wife and two daughters are the only sane ones in his family--his three sons are crazy like him--and the same was true with his uncle who has five daughters. He mentioned again his son with Crone's disease.

He lectured for awhile after that, but soon went on a rant about cell phones and brought up the fact that he has ADD. Then he told a story about encountering a patient with Cri du Chat Syndrome when he was a resident in Chicago, at the children's hospital, the same hospital where his childhood best friend had died of brain cancer. That led into a story about a woman he worked with who had Marfan's Syndrome and who almost died except that she was 100 feet from the operating room when her aorta blew out and she was lucky to have survived.

Then he used his familial history of hypercholesterolemia, telling us his, his mother's, and father's respective LDL levels. Then he told us about working for the CDC,  how his wife is not good with math, and how he once did work on a legal team that represented Michael Jordan. (I spaced out during the sports-related stories.) Then he went on a rant about how intelligence doesn't run in families and how IQ tests are culturally biased.

I missed taking notes on his rant about how women who have children with fetal alcohol syndrome should face criminal charges for drinking while pregnant. I also missed taking notes on how he thinks that we should be doing more to test misbehaving boys to find out whether they're XXY. His final rant of the evening was about how ultrasounds and amniocentesis were dangerous and how often Down's Syndrome was misdiagnosed in utero. I didn't take notes when he told us about a man he saw die of dehydration on the side of the road on his first trip to New Mexico when he was driving route 666 because it was amazing that we have a route 666 and he called his wife on his way to Shiprock to tell her that they had to move her because it's amazing that we have a route 666.

That is all one lecture's worth of rants, personal info, and so on. Some of it is tangentially related to the material, so there is that.

He does cover the material in the midst of all that, but it's hurriedly, and his favorite question (often issued without waiting for a response) is, "Does that make sense to you guys?"  He uses it over and over. "Does that make sense to you guys?" "Does that make sense to you guys?"

Anyway, it's exhausting. He's exhausting. But I don't dislike him, so. (Check back after the first exam. That positive-ish opinion may be fleeting.)

Tonight we took some time out to go to dinner with Judi and Paul at a newish restaurant called Matanza. We shared a big appetizer of guacamole, salsa, and queso served with chips and chicharrones. I had a big plate of meat (ribs, pork belly, and carne adobada served with beans and calabacitas). Poor Dave, the vegetarian, had a flatbread pizza kind of thing with a side of crispy brussellettes (a.k.a. Brussels sprouts). We shared a pear cider (I had about four sips, Dave had the rest) and were going to share a dry, bitter beer, but my tongue said no way, so Dave had that too. We shared dessert, all four of us, a cheesecake filled sopapilla with ice cream (the sopa was tasty, but the cheesecake filling was just wrong) and a biscochito zookie (a biscochito cookie base topped with ice cream (tasty, but a big hit of white flour and white sugar).

The food was really good, but the place was insanely loud. It was not great for Paul, whose hearing is compromised. And I walked out of there hoarse from trying to make myself heard over the din.

I should be studying right now, but I'm in a pork-induced daze. Instead I think I'm going to sit down and watch a movie on Netflix.