Glossary

Rectal: Referring to the rectum aka inside your booty hole

Tag Days: Everyone's favorite fun-raiser for the kids #FTK! When med students take over downtown Ann Arbor dressed up in onesies and harass— I mean, encourage— strangers to donate. A great cause that doubles as a great excuse to get ~happy~ and end up at Skeeps.

Gomer: an acronym that stands for "Get Out of My Emergency Room", using this term unironically will prove you were born before the invention of penicillin

RVUs: Relative Value Units - how the system decides how "productive" our doctors are

Grand Rounds: A weekly department surprise! No one ever knows the topic but everyone pretends to pay attention!

Figs: the Lululemon (TM) of scrubs; wearing these will prove how much better you are than everyone in those frumpy teal scrubs, however the real cost isn't the high price-tag... it's that fact that you'll have to start doing your own laundry

Vageen: Slang for "vagina" but according to urban dictionary, also slang for "friend". Do with that what you will.

Menstrual: See Flow

HITS Major Incident: Basically the IT Department flooding our DMs when we really couldn't care less that the radiology system is down

Paging System: Not only is it archaic, but it's also unreliable! Sometimes it'll even scramble your message as a fun little way to spice up the DMs to your favorite consult physician.

Batholin's Cyst: A fluid-filled sac and the opening of the vaginal canal? No thank you.

Flow: See Menstrual

Match: This awesome system where a computer decides where in the country we will move to during our late 20s/early 30s to continue our medical training

CME: Continuing Medical Eduction. Basically we never really graduate and we will take tests for the rest of our lives.

Medical Student Evaluations: A process by which doctors attempt to make deeply personal criticisms sound more objective and professional by giving students a numerical rating of 1-9.

Pandemic: I think y'all know this one by now

Golden Pitchfork Award: Move over Silver Shovel! The Golden Pitchfork is the most prestigous teaching award given to faculty, which conveniently doubles as a weapon that can be used to ward off jealous attendings

Oto: Short for Otolaryngology, because even ENTs can't wrap their mouths around something that long

Time-Out: A little ice-breaker we all do in the operating room before we perform a surgery

Incision: The cut that starts a surgery and makes the scar you see at the end, clearly a job for the anxious med student with the shaky hands

Otolaryngology: A fancy name for ears, nose, and throat doctors, aka ENTs, the surgeons in charge of all the face-holes

Scope Your Nose: A way for otolaryngologists to look past all those boogers

Tube Your Ears: A surgery ENTs use to threaten children who cry too much on airplanes

Reading Room: Where radiologists go to nnnnaaa-interpret medical images-aaappppp

Mott: The colorful part of the hospital where all the cute kids are

OR: Operating Room, where surgery attendings go to avoid the paperwork for their second divorce

Ectopic Pregnancy: When you're pregnant but the fetus decides to set up shop in the wrong place (aka not in your uterus) - this is bad news bears

Infundibulopelvic Ligament: A ligament? Somewhere? In the pelvis?

Suspensory Ligament: Apparently another word for the infundibulopelvic ligament? I'll have to add that to my Anki deck.

Scrubs: PJs we get to wear to work

ENT: Ears, nose, and throat; see otolaryngology

Sterile Field: According to the scrub nurse, something the medical student can contaminate just by standing still

The VA: If Uncle Sam threw up all over a very large building, I imagine it woud look like the VA. A hospital providing care for our veterans. And reminding them at every turn that we are in AMERICA and this is the land of the free

Getting Credentialed: An unnecessarily complicated and drawn-out process where medical students basically get registered as federal employees, by navigating the bureaucracy with three separate visits to the VA hospital with two forms of ID, all for the privilege of using a badge that needs three PINs to set up and requires a login every 90 days for eternity. Otherwise you get to start all over!

Level 7 Syphilis: It's like tertiary syphilis but then add four levels. This is definitely a real thing. We totally didn't make this up. I hear Sandro Cinti's writing a case report about it.

Saint-Chopra Guide: A book inspired by alphabet soup. It's outlandish mnemonics lead them to open up a fiction section in the medical school library.

Prostate Exam: A finger in the butthole, but not in the kinky way

CPRS: The VA's electronic medical record, dating from the pre-Internet age

MI: Fancy medical speak for heart attack and omg I just realized this is also the state abbreviation for Michigan...

COPD: "Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease" aka you smoked a lot of cigarettes and now your lungs suck

Pack-Year History: # of packs a person smokes per day multiplied by the # of years they have smoked for

Discharge: Letting a patient leave the hospital. Or liquid stuff oozing out of a body part.

Renal Tubular Acidoses: Something about the kidney? We don't get it either

Smoke Shack: An old building outside the VA where everyone used to smoke (because what doesn't kill ya makes you stronger right?) - it was torn down, so they started smoking at the covered bike rack. That was torn down too... Seems like they don't want us to smoke?

Scrub In: An elaborate hand-washing ritual and dance that must be performed before doing surgery; like many dances, it can be done alone but you will look silly doing it

ID: A rectangular piece of plastic that gives M1s a false sense of importance and FAR too much access to the hospital. However, no matter how hard you try it will not let you into the VA parking lot.

Oracle: A priest/priestess acting as a medium through whom advice or prophecy was sought from the Gods

Auricle: Your earlobe

Clerkships: A form of hazing where second-year medical students are required to rotate through different specialties so that they know what it feels like to be inferior in many different contexts

Blue Card: A misleadingly fun-colored checklist that's unnecessarily difficult for students to get signed by the end of each rotation.

Doctor: the definition of this term is currently being debated by the public

MD Doctor: a REAL doctor

Pannus: medical speak for FUPA

Sternothyroid: Some muscle in your neck somewhere?

Sternohyoid: Some other muscle in your neck somewhere?

Histology: The art of looking at pink and purple blobs and knowing it's ~obviously a piece of tissue taken from the first 3mm of a healthy 34 year old's ileum~

Pathology: The perfect medical speciality for anybody who never wants to interact with another human being ever. Ever.

Emeritus Professors: When you're so important that you still hold a title after you retire...

Bristol Stool Chart: Literally a chart that rates your poops

Hematochezia: When you poop blood (if this is happening to you please notify your doctor)

Differential: A list of literally everything we are considering as your diagnosis. This list will always include lupus. It is never lupus.

Ischemic Colitis: When your intestine has a stroke

Viral Gastroenteritis: Ever had the stomach flu?

Crohn's: When the inside of your intestine looks like a cobblestone street. Don't ask us, ask the United States Medical Liscensing Examination.

Fissures: Kind of like a paper cut but in your anus

Disimpact: See Fecal Disimpaction below

Retract: Something to keep medical students occupied in the operating room so they don't try to "help" in other ways.

PHI: Top Secret. We can't discuss this here...

Growth Curves: Magical black and white Rainbows which map height, weight, and head circumference. TBH glad they don't have these for adults I don't need that negativity in my life

Chief Complaint: Da reason you came to the hospital. You gotta pick ONE!

Anatomical Donations Program: Donating your body to science AKA first year medical students

Cervix: The bottom part of your uterus that the doctor looks for during a pelvic exam, it looks like a cute little donut hole

BV: Bacterial Vaginosis: A condition related to a shifting of good/bad bacteria of the vaginal flora. Do you smell it? That smell. A kind of smelly smell. The smelly smell that smells...smelly.

C-A-G-E: A screening tool that literally diagnoses every single one of us with alcohol use disorder.

TPO: Some enzyme we learned about one time. Does something in your thyroid?

HIPAA: The law that keeps doctors from talking shit about their patients in the elevator and looking up Donald Trump's psychiatric history

Fournier's Gangrene: Please don't google image search this

M4: Very few sightings have been documented of these mythical creatures, but the rumor is that they can be enticed out of hiding with lots of free food and swag!

ERAS: Would you believe me if I told you we have to apply to yet another program that we will attend after we graduate from this one?

Queef: Vagina farts

Breech Birth: Baby coming out feet first AKA briefly wearing mom as a hat

Child Life: The Fairy Godparents of Mott Hospital! Everytime you turn around they have an ipad and a new toy! WHERE DO THEY KEEP ALL OF THESE TOYS?!?

EVS: Environmental services AKA the unsung heroes of this pandemic

CPR Certified: A Certificate given to those who spend an afternoon learning to pound on someone's chest to the beat of 'Stayin' Alive'

AAMC: I don't think any of us know what the American Association of Medical Colleges reaaaaally is, but they email us a lot.

Antimicrobial Stewardship Pocket Book: Sandro Cinti's Handy Dandy Little Notebook.

MEN2B: Every medical student's Valentine's card. But also a genetic syndrome that none of said medical students can ever seem to remember. Is pheochromocytoma in this one?

PE: "Pulmonary embolism" - a blood clot in your lungs.

G3P2001: How OB/GYNs write someone's pregnancy history in shorthand. Also Maya Hammoud's vanity license plate number, probably.

Victor's Care: Did someone say Kim Eagle? Oh right, Victor's Care...Super fancy medical care for people with lots of money. I hear it's very convenient.

Gold Parking: The most highly coveted, and most expensive, parking passes at Michigan Medicine. This is how you know you've made it.

Consults: The hospital equivalent to a game of "not it".

UptoDate: Wikipedia for doctors.

Fecal disimpaction: A finger workout inside somebody else’s anal orifice. The reward? Huge gains...of stool.