Exercise

Medical students follow attendings everywhere they go. I have almost followed attendings into the bathroom about 4 or 5 times. In fact, we have a tendency to follow all kinds of people: Interns, residents, nurses, patients, janitors, basically anyone who seems to have some kind of clue about what they are about to do next in their day because we generally don't have any idea.

My Attending is well aware of the fact that I follow him everywhere. My attending is also a marathon runner. So yesterday we had to go from the first floor to third floor for some reason (again, I often have no idea what is going on) so being impatient my attending decided to take the stairs. No problem. I can handle that. It's just a few flights of stairs. As we start jogging up the stairs (again, he is a marathoner) I begin to get a little winded. No problem. 3rd floor is within sight. We finally get to the 3rd floor, but he passes it and continues to jog. "Okay," I think to myself, "I never know anything anyways so we are probably going to see a patient somewhere on 4th." We don't stop on 4th, or 5th, or 6th. At this point I feel as though I am literally about to die (luckily I'm with a doctor) and am all but gasping for breath as my attending makes it to the roof level and triumphantly states, "Yeah! Okay! That was fun! You want to do it again? Going down is even harder cause your legs are like jello!"

Have you ever been the only winded person in a group of people after moderate or mild exercise? You know how hard it is to pretend you aren't winded? On the one hand your muscles and vital organs are screaming for oxygen and begging you to gulp down as much air as possible, and on the other hand the social situation demands that you risk passing out in order to avoid the embarrassment of being out of shape. So you just stand there and talk in slow bursts and try to breath through your nose only. Well, I couldn't pull that off. I was gasping like a newborn. His reply, "What's wrong with you? I'm like 30 years older than you."

So I'm preparing for my evaluation to say, "Well, he's okay in surgery but he's out of shape and a little fat." Yeah, that's going to look good on the dean's letter.