Arrhythmia center; medical terminology.

Edit 10/6/09
Hello to all the people out there who just Googled "gastro gas truck" and have been unhelpfully directed to my blog! Guess what, I'm tired of seeing your search terms pop up in my stats counter. So, here you go, a link to the videos you're looking for:

The Dean Vaughn Total Retention System
http://www.dcminstructionalsystems.com

And now back to your regularly scheduled program...

I spent the morning shadowing a nurse in the arrhythmia center. It was boring. All she did was make phone calls to check on patients' pacemakers, and perform in-office pacemaker/defibrillator evaluations, adjusting the current/resistance through the wires as necessary. Since I haven't yet buckled down and learned to read EKGs, the only thing I could make of the graphs was something like, "Ooh, look at the pretty repeating pattern!" Blah. My only consolation was when I found out that Kyle didn't get to see anything exciting in the pain clinic this morning, because the anesthesiologist had no procedures to perform. Score.

This afternoon we had a medical terminology lecture. It was delivered via a VHS video produced sometime around 1983. The thinking behind the video series is that medical terms are too complicated to learn by rote memorization, so they add an audionym and ridiculous phrase to make the terms easy to remember. For example:

"'Gastro' sounds like 'gas truck.'
(*picture of gas truck appears*)
'Gastro' means 'stomach.' Now, imagine if the gas truck suddenly turns into a...stomach!
(*gas truck turns into stomach*)
Gastro...gas truck...stomach."

And on and on. Some of the audionyms made sense, but most were absurd. None of us could figure out how they got from "-malacia" to "my late show (TV)" to "soft." Anyway, we have 350 of these prefixes, modifiers, and suffixes to wade through over the course of the semester, and I have no idea if I'm actually going to remember anything using this weird method. I'd almost rather be told to go home and just memorize the words without all the time spent watching the videos. We'll see what happens, I guess.