[Perspectives] Words on the Wards

One of the first pieces of advice I got before starting medical school was that taking in the sheer amount of information we were about to learn was going to be like “drinking from a firehose”. At first, this worried me—a firehose didn’t sound particularly pleasant, as water sources go—but after a while, I heard it so often that the deluge of information that did indeed come with the first semester of medical school wasn’t much of a surprise. What was a surprise, however, was how many other phrases like that cropped up during that first semester, phrases that everyone seemed to use, but no one really defined.