Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Concerning poems in the haiku form

The more keen-eyed of my readers will have noticed that I've been on a bit of haiku fling recently.  It's kind of my thing - I get caught up in an idea and have trouble moving on until I've wrung all the fun out of it and given it a few more squeezes just for good measure.  You may remember my similar binge of appalling Ernest Hemingway jokes about six months back.  Or my stuttering War On Innumeracy.  Or perhaps you've suppressed those memories.

Anyway, some of you are getting sick of my poems in haiku form.  Some of you like them.  And some of you are getting freaked out by them.  The first two responses are fair enough.  But please, please, do not respond by getting freaked out.  These poems in haiku form (dammit, that's getting tiresome to type, I'm just going to call them haikus from now on!) are not, as you may think, a representative sample of my medical knowledge.  They are the entirety of it.  Every time I learn something new, I write a haiku.  So if you come across something you don't know yet, just think of all the things you do know that I haven't written about yet.

I had a big start to my study binge.  I learned 4 or 5 new things that day.  Since then I've really slowed down.  But that's okay, medicine is not a race.  Not unless somebody is dying right in front of you, in which case it kind of is a race, except it's the winner who dies.  So why rush?

So I'll finish this post with a haiku about medical haikus just to be a little bit post-modern.

Medical haikus
Encapsulate my knowledge
In pithy verses.

(image swiped from savagechickens.com without permission but with much admiration)

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've got some practice OSCEs for you:

OSCE station one
Take history from this man
He has some chest pain

OSCE station two
Examine this man's left knee
He has some knee pain

OSCE station three
Give this man an injection
He will have arm pain

OSCE station four
Break some bad news to this man
He will be upset

OSCE station five
Prescribe the pill to this girl
She wants no babies

OSCE station six
This one is a rest station
Please put your feet up

OSCE station seven....hmm

PTR said...

Awesome! So I just need to revise chests, knees, arms, news, babies, and feet.

I am going to smash this OSCE, I can feel it in my bones!

Vonbon said...

Am I doing it wrong if I pronounce "entire" in the form of 3 syllables?

PTR said...

Good question VB. I think the answer depends on who you are. I pronounce it as a diphthong but you may be enuncuating more than I do.