Kinkos, Eat Your Heart Out!

Today was the last day of my surgery rotation!

At the hospital today we had to "sign-out", a process that involved an oral exam with one of the attending physicians, a review of our case logs, a card where we had the procedures that we performed signed-off and turning in our pagers, keys, evaluation forms etc.

Several of us had our oral exam yesterday and it wasn't as bad as we had heard. Anyway, a few students and I were in the library where I was completing my patient logs (a requirement for school) when fellow student and friend Jersey Pete walked in.

Me: Hey Pete

JP: What are you doing? Oh, patient logs huh.

Me: Do you need any blank ones or are you finished?

JP: Nah, I'm gonna print mine out- I did them in Excel.

Now, for those of you who don't know Jersey Pete: this last sentence was the mental equivalent of hearing Snoop Dogg covering a Puccini aria! Whiskey Tango Foxtrot indeed!

He walked away and headed toward the back of the library toward the printers.

JP is not exactly what I would call, the most" tech-savy" guy I know. As a matter of fact, he was notorious for only checking his email account once a semester or so. Rumor had it that it took his computer that long to log in. And recently when I was at his apartment his "laptop" was the computing equivalent of a rust-eaten 1974 Ford Maverick. He asked me to take a look at it because in his words it was "running a little slow". While the full extent of his computer problems probably deserve their own post, suffice it to say that I half expected to open up the case and find either a small Asian boy with an abacus or a gerbil furiously running on an excercise wheel about to give up the ghost.

Anyway, after a few minutes, Pete returned form the printer area and sat down next to us- but it was no longer the same friend I had met 3 years ago. He was somehow...different- the flicker of light that lived behind his eyes had dimmed ever so slightly- but noticably. He was no longer "good old Jersey Pete".

The pressures of medical school it seems has claimned another victim. Some people turn to violence as in the alleged "CraigsList Killer" and others are so radically transformed that they are barely recognizable as the people they once were. Allow me to explain...

When Pete came back from the printer he wasn't carrying a standard stack of 8x11 printed pages, no this was something alltogther different. When he sat down what he placed on the desk in front of him was thing that Legends are made of. It was a binder, nay , a bound masterpiece that any OCD patient would be proud to call his own. Pete had somehow printed and compiled not only his Patient log, but his Surgery Case Log, his Patient Case Write-Ups, and a List of ALL the cases that were discussed during our "morning report", the hospital's version of grand rounds. Not only this- but each section was separated with neon-brightly colored tabbed dividers and he EVEN INCLUDED A TABLE OF BLOODY CONTENTS on the first page!!! But my meager descriptions fail to do this epic tome justice; so allow me to present:

The Jersey Pete Complete Surgery Rotation Compendium and Reference Manual Vol 1
(Click on the pictures to enlarge)

(drum roll..........)



Notice the glossy polyvinyl cover, and that personal touch of orange highlighter on the spine!



No longer do you have to aimlessly flip pages (all 30 of them) to find what you need! This semi-automatic Table of Contents will guide you there in a jiffy!



Is that 100% Naugahyde© ?



It certainly makes a handsome addition to any bookshelf. A treasure to be cherished for generations!

My fellow students were excited beyond words to be photographed with this Masterpiece:






The Creator and his MASTERPIECE:



Now, to fully understand the transformation that this represents, consider the following facts:

• For 11 of the last 12 weeks, Jersey Pete's lab coat has resembled a Jackson Pollack masterpiece of stains. I often joked- that to find out what the cafeteria has for lunch, I just look at JP's coat. He has had a series of coffee stains so absolutely prominent I thought he would be mistaken for a Holstein cow. The man walked around with a soy sauce stain in the shape of Africa on his sleeve for 3 weeks! I bet that one could culture his lab coat and produce a whole new species of life never before encountered on this planet.
• One morning Pete showed up to rounds late, and without pants- well, to be fair- without SCRUB pants. He decided to "borrow" a pair of white Tyvek pants from someone in the maintenance department and walked around proudly all day in his (see-through) white disposable pants.
• At any given time during our rotation Pete had the equivalent of the entire New York Metropolitan Area Phone Book jammed, stuffed, folded, wedged, and hidden in his various pockets. Every time he tried to pull something out of a pocket, the ensuing eruption resembled a bulimic Pica patient who had been locked in a paper factory.
• Through no fault of his own, for the last month, JP has been living in an apartment with no electricity. An ongoing dispute with his landlord and the electric company has left our poor hero, literally, in the dark. Despite several offers by yours truly to come stay with us, he has been living by candlelight- which makes the above book even more impressive!

Please, don't get me wrong... Pete is an incredibly bright and knowledgeable guy who I would feel safe having treat my family, but to say that a color-coded, Table-of Context-ed, neatly printed and bound complete collection of all pertinent data is a tad "out of character" would be quite the understatement.

Clearly, his were balls that needed to be broken.

Mission accomplished!