SST: Doctor Ernie

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

When you're learning how to be a doctor you sometimes need pretend patients to practice on:



My friend Adam works at the University of Michigan department of medical education and over Christmas break he emailed me with a job opportunity. I quote:

The job is to be a "patient" making phone calls to medical students as part of a course preparing them to be surgical residents. In addition to evaluating how they handle your "case," you would also evaluate their communication skills such as directness, clarity, assertiveness, etc.

He said that he thought that I would be a good fit for this particular case because unlike the other more purely clinical cases, this one includes an element of performance. He even had me send his supervisor my stage experience resume rather than my normal job resume, because it takes a great thespian to convincingly portray the emotional life of a patient:



It's a pretty good gig, although I have to admit that the novelty wears off a bit once you've gone through the exact same shtick thirty or so times. Maybe I should occasionally throw in the phrase "coquettish haberdasher" to keep things interesting.

Note: I promised Adam I wouldn't divulge any specifics about the case because there's always the slight chance that a medical student involved in the course could find my blog and have an unfair advantage over his/her peers. You'll just have to guess what my ailment might be.

P.S. If you want to watch the entire Kramer and Mickey story from that episode of Seinfeld, some guy pointed a video camera at his TV screen and put the videos on YouTube (in other words, the quality isn't great): Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6.