Clinic

When I was in the 12th grade, my honors government class took a quiz of sorts that would help us tell which side of the partisan line we inhabited. My teacher, who was one of the best teachers I had in all of high school, was trying to make the point that there are not the stereotypical Two Types Of People in politics, as mainstream thought generally conveys, but instead most people would lie somewhere around the middle. He said that there will always be a few outliers, but that the majority of people agree on most things and tend to think alike.

Guess who was one of the outliers.

I scored ten points more liberal than my closest liberal classmate, and was roundly viewed as the Leftist Crazy of the class. It’s not that I disagreed with most of my more moderate classmates, not at all. It’s just that I believed in taking things to their endpoint and most black and white of statements, which resulted in coming across as the Leftist Crazy.

This same principle applies to medicine and Clinic vs. Operating Room people. Most people lie somewhere between the two extremes and enjoy parts of both worlds. Most people can move back and forth between the two facets of medicine, the office and the procedure room, with relative ease and, while they may prefer one to the other, can function equally well in both.

Again, I am an outlier.

I hate clinic. I loathe clinic. I dread it beforehand and count the minutes until it is over while I’m there. It’s hard to explain what is so bad about it; the people are generally fine and the patients are generally nice enough and the medical issues are sometimes interesting. Maybe it’s the slow march of time as people with varying complaints wind in and out of the office while you buzz around, too short on time and too long on menial tasks, that kills the clinic experience for me. Or perhaps it is the endless droning on of patients and their scrolls upon scrolls of problems and medicines and tangents that makes me want to stab myself in the eye.

It’s hard to tell what it is about clinic that I despise so much, but one thing is for sure: I am not a Clinic Person.

One week down out of four.

That is, if I don’t drop out of medical school and go fold jeans at the Gap in order to avoid the last three weeks.