Yay, I got reviewed!

The very kind Mark at Blogs of Medical Students has written a little blurb about my little blog here, and basically compares me to an unedited, X-rated Dr. Gregory House (with whom my aunt seems to wish I could procure her a date).

This brought something to my attention: I have a dirty potty mouth. I've known this for years. The problem came when I entered the pediatrics rotation and I suddenly had to clean it up. But why, you might say, did it take the peds rotation to make you clean up your mouth? Surely it is always unprofessional to curse at work, regardless of the rotation you're on! To this I reply, you are indeed correct; however, my first rotation was surgery. Surgeons are the most uncouth, foul-mouthed group in the whole hospital. One of my attendings would end a particularly difficult or nasty case by saying: "Well, y'all, this is about like that ol' fox, makin' love to that skunk. He said, 'I think I've had about all this good stuff I can handle.'" No curse word was too dirty for these dirty old men, especially the trauma surgeons.

Pediatricians, on the other hand, are a little nicer. Smoother around the edges when it comes to their language, perhaps. There were no F-bombs in morning report in pediatrics; no "oh, shit!" when the intern failed the 14th freaking time to enter the subarachnoid space during an LP; there wasn't even cursing when there were no patients around (of course, when there were no patients it tended to be "just us girls", but still, haven't these ladies ever seen Sex and the City??). It was a striking difference.

Here's a conundrum. If pediatricians don't curse, and surgeons curse a lot, then what about pediatric surgeons? I've been told that pediatric surgeons tend to be the foulest-mouthed of them all, or at least the ones at our hospital are. Apparently, all the jokes were sexual, to the point where a fellow female classmate felt sexually harrassed. I wonder if the pedi surg guys just need to relieve the tension, or if they're overcompensating for going into a less "manly" type of surgery than, say, ortho. (Whenever I think of orthopods, I think of The Todd and smile).