Someone asked me: Why cardiology?

I found the process of memorizing things utterly useless compared learning to how things work. How a white blood cell “walks” by elongating building blocks of proteins. How muscles contract by actin and myosin proteins sliding into each other. But I could not memorize things.

To remember the cranial nerves, we used a horrible mnemonic device seemingly thought up by a frustrated 13-year-old boy: “Oh, Oh, Oh, To Touch And Feel A Girl’s (…), Ahh, Heaven.” It stood for “Ophthalmic, Olefactory, Occulomotor,” etc. The censored word stood for the Vagus nerve. The rest of the nerves, however, I could never remember, even though I am still tormented with that embarrassingly immature ditty.

That’s probably why I didn’t really like studying infectious diseases — memorizing drugs and bugs. Parasitology, on the other hand, was interesting. Take round worms: You accidentally eat roundworm eggs in unclean food. Eggs become larvae in the gut, pass through the bloodstream to the lungs, then they swim up the windpipe to the throat where they are swallowed down the esophagus and become full grown worms that breed in the intestines. They lay eggs, which are passed, only to be eaten because someone didn’t wash his hands.

I loved the logic (and illogic) of neurology. Someone can stroke out the part of the brain that connected vision with movement. Or the part connecting the right side to the left. One guy buttoned his shirt with his left hand and unbuttoned it with his right, unaware. Another guy didn’t recognize his dead arm, saying, “It’s a communist. It doesn’t like to work.” But at the time, there wasn’t much to do about these things other than, as the saying went: “diagnose and adios.”

The G.I. tract is an amazing organ because, as one professor told us, “The anus can distinguish between emitting gas or releasing solid waste and hardly ever get confused between the two.” We all experience the phenomenon every day, but we don’t think about it. Except, as my professor said, “When you throw liquid into the mix, oh, then there’s a big problem.”

The liver, the kidneys and the pancreas are incredible organs, each like the coolest chemistry set.

Ah, but then I met the heart, and it was love. Pressure and volume and electricity and plumbing, all interconnected. It was like getting to play at Home Depot with all sorts of pumps and pipes and connectors and switches and wires. My first night with an ICU patient was a sleepless, wonderful night of drips to increase pressure, change urine output and decrease pulse. A machine increased the breathing. My resident was a great teacher and stayed up with me, as enthusiastic as I was. We saved the guy and felt euphoric the next day as we described it to our colleagues. There was so much to learn but nothing to memorize, and it all just made sense. But other than the vagus nerve (which is very important in cardiology), I still couldn’t remember the patient’s cranial nerves.