Wow I have really bad hearing problems.
Today our attending was talking about our patient with infantile spasms. The attending, Lord bless him, has a very soft voice, and he talks very fast. It takes an extreme amount of effort for me to keep up with him, and concentrate on what he’s saying.
He always has a lot of interesting stories about stuff back. Like today, he talked about back in the day, the drug of choice was ACTH. The guy who I guess created the synthetic version of it for use as a drug, wasn’t readily accepted into the American Chemical Society because of its hyperpigmentation. Odd thing was I was sitting towards the back of the room, and as I was straining my ear to hear him, and despite all my efforts, I somehow got the idea that the hyperpigmentation referred to the actual chemist, not the drug. So here I am in the back of the room thinking. 1. Wow there was a lot of racism back in the day huh? Never knew there were such inspiring black chemists back in the day. 2. Did my attending just refer to the black guy as hyperpigmented???
Needless to say, I was very amused and asked my peer if we had heard the same thing. She remembered nothing of the sort. Came home and told my roommate. Telling the story to her, made me realize how odd it was, and I decided to check the facts to see if the chemist really was black. Looked at his picture yeah definitely wasn’t black. Through much research, my roommate and I finally realized my great misunderstanding. And I was very thankful that I never really talk out loud that much during morning rounds.
