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Just made a humiliating mistake? We’ve all been there. These are real stories, compiled by Ara Downey with all names substituted for those of minor Percy Jackson characters.
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At the end of my second year (ergo, integrated classes) we had an anatomy lab where the demonstrator kept quizzing us on some content we had done the year before. I couldn’t remember any of the answers and she eventually said “it’s fine, you clearly haven’t done this before.” I was too embarrassed to correct her, so I spent the rest of the class pretending I was a first year.
Chris Rodriguez (IV)
In my first ever SP session I mixed up the patient’s right and left side and the patient started laughing so hard he broke character.
Lou Ellen (III)
Once while doing a practice OSCE I spent so long failing to use the equipment that the patient had to explain how it worked to me.
Ethen Nakamura (III)
I planned my day poorly and came to clinical skills not having had any food or water. Long story short, I passed out while someone was practicing taking a manual blood pressure on me and she thought she had killed me.
Katie Gardner (III)
Can’t tell you the number of times I’ve taken a history and realised at the end I forgot to ask the patient’s name…
Charles Beckendorf (II)
In my OSCE I took a blood pressure three times on the same arm because I couldn’t hear anything. After the third time I realised I was using the wrong side of the stethoscope.
Frank Zhang (IV)
I always think it’s better to say something even if it might be wrong, so when I don’t know an answer I just make up random a medical fact that sounds plausible.
Will Solace (V)
In one of my classes I answered a question so wrong that my tutor burst out laughing and had to take a moment to compose herself.
Sherman Yang (II)
I invented a nonexistent body part. Enough said.
Lily Boone (II)
Last year I took a blood pressure so badly that not only did I get it massively wrong, I accidentally implied the nineteen-year-old SP had advanced heart failure… The SP and the tutor looked at each other wordlessly and that’s how I knew I was screwed.
Malcolm Pace (IV)
At the end of an anatomy lab we had a spot test, and one of the tutors — evidently very eager to go home — jumpscared me by tapping me on the shoulder and then started giving me the answers to shout out in hopes of speeding up the class. For one of them he told me it was “the second longest option” which I figured out was the SMA … and then panicked, brain farted, and said “superior mesenteric vein”.
This was swiftly followed by “[I can’t print this level of vulgarity in the Jugular -Ara]” from the tutor.
Evangeline Evans (III)
I did a mock OSCE with student SPs and we had to do a cardiovascular exam. My SP was a female patient, and to make a long story short, I was too embarrassed to do the exam properly so I just … skipped the entire examination of the praecordium. Needless to say I didn’t do very well in that one.
Michael Yew (IV)
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