I would just like to say that I was NOT one of those girls/ six pairs of hands percussing the old lady till she suffered a spontaneous vertebral fracture. I was right next to her but she looked so sick that I had no heart to join in the misogynistic festivities. So call me a wet blanket.

Incidentally, anodyne passed on some great pearls of wisdom he picked up from GTA : San Andreas. I've decided to adopt them as my personal mantra.

"If you can eat your food while all around you everybody is losing theirs and blaming you for it, then you're a man."

Thanks anodyne, for your support and invaluable advice.

Anyway, today's blog is about the darker kind of medical students. Even more annoying than your medical leech (egads!), these denizens infiltrate every social situation with a kind of off-world aura. If you want to break up any social gathering asap, this is the companion that you have to bring along.

He is, the Medical Bore.

(At this point I'm extremely tempted to post a photograph of our cg, but we haven't taken any yet so..)

Mention any symptom, and he'll immediately launch into a deluge of differential diagnoses and recommended treatments. A typical conversation with a medical bore goes like this :

Bored: I feel giddy.

Bore : Oh my God! Is it vertiginous? Do you have cloudy vision or diplopia? It could be a stroke! A tumour! Oh someone please call an ambulance! (Faints from excitement)

It appears that the long hours spent in the wards has altered the Medical Bore's mental state to one of constant doctoring. When he walks on the street, every person he sees is target practice for spot diagnosis. A typical teenager with a bad case of acne is "lupus". An old lady emerging from the hospital with an eye-patch is "laser treatment". This brings people-watching to a whole new level, and also causes eye-strain for the Bored due to excessive eyeball rolling.

The Medical Bore is torture to have as a cg mate, as he delights in lording over his lesser cg mates (defined as anybody who volunteers less answers during tutorials) with his superior medical knowledge. After every tutorial, when the tutor has clearly indicated his desire to go off for lunch, the Medical Bore insidiously cuts in with a "oh, Dr. so-and-so, just a quick question.." and then proceeds to barrage the baffled tutor with 30 minutes worth of complicated and irrelevant questions. At the end of it, everybody ends up feeling vaguely dissatisfied, very hungry and having to rush off for the next tutorial without even the consolation of a hotdog puff.

Unfortunately, the Medical Bore is such a common phenomenon that more than half the student population would be jailed if it were to be made a crime. As such, the rest of us, the Clearly Boreds (CB), have no choice but to suffer silently, and maybe do the occasional yan2 bao3 jian4 cao1 to preserve the integrity of our ocular muscles and prevent our eyeballs from rolling out of their sockets.