DOCTORS have to answer calls in all kinds of weather. So although, the wind was as sharp as a scalpel and the occasion hardly qualified as an emergency, yesterday's open day at the Royal College of Surgeons was a predictably well attended affair.
About 300 aspiring medical students came for a day of snappily titled talks, such as: "So you want to be a doctor?" and "Womb with a view". In between, they were treated to an exhibition featuring such delights as a video of the "thoracoscopic lobectomy" procedure.
For those who don't know, this involves a lot of mushy red parts being mangled by what looked like a stapler, which was either separating or joining them together when it became difficult to watch. Then there was lunch, and any students caught not enjoying their food were instantly disqualified from a medical career.
Doctors, and those who aspire to be doctors, are not like the rest of us. By way of light relief yesterday, for instance, students were tempted by a competition in two parts. The first featured a plastic head which had more unexplained growths than a register of TDs bank accounts, and entrants were required to sort their papillomas from their seborrhoeic warts and then say which ones were benign.
"These are sick people," muttered one young girl, perhaps realising that her vocation was in accountancy. Most were more enthusiastic, however, if not always on top of the discipline. "What does benign mean?" a linguistically challenged student asked her friend. "Fatal?" the friend offered, before they decided to seek a second opinion.
But the other part of the competition was more challenging, involving as it did a plastic scrotum which students were asked to examine before ticking one of four boxes marked "left testicle," "right testicle,", "neither" or "both".
Female students were initially reluctant (male ones seemed to prefer not to even think about it) to touch the object: "You examine it." "No, you do." But doctor like, they overcame their inhibitions and were soon grasping the organ with the enthusiasm of rugby forwards.
Kate Clinton from Sandymount, Dublin, was one of many who completed the entry form. She had the advantage of being a mature student in sports massage therapy, but wasn't sure if she had the right answers.
Among those who preferred the video entertainment were Suzanne Byrne from Rush, Co Dublin, and Jane Wolff from Patrickswell, Limerick. Due to sit their Leaving Certs in 1998 and 1999 respectively, they calculated they would be fully qualified surgeons about 2015, but neither was in any way daunted.
