Specialists Are Very Important and Serious

Our local ophthalmologist is a friendly old guy that literally everyone knows, because he's pretty much the only ophthalmologist around (it's a small country). He's been at it so long he didn't actually have to do a residency, he just learned it all himself and sat the board exams just like that. So, that's cool.

Considering he drives a very expensive looking car and travels around the area doing all sorts of fancy I-didn't-know-you-could-even-do-that surgeries, you'd think he'd be a serious kinda guy, but he isn't. He wears a T-shirt during surgery, flirts with all the ladies, and makes bad jokes constantly, in between sewing up his suture pattern that's so tiny he's using a microscope to see his incision. I was holding something for him at one point as he cut away some excess tissue in a non-sterile procedure. He quite casually kept wiping bits off of his forceps onto my bare hand.

I don't know how he doesn't go cross-eyed doing those tiny surgeries every day, but he makes several thousand dollars for like fifteen minutes of work, soooo... some days, ophthalmology is pretty temping!

Snooze You Loose

Student: *Half falling asleep on desk* *Big yawn*

Prof: Warm afternoon on a sunny day, eh?

Student: Sorry! Post-prandial coma.

Prof: I fell asleep during my own tutorial once. A student was answering a question, and it must have been the soporific effect of her voice or something, put me right to sleep.

Said in Surgery Rounds

Surgeon: What's a "cherry eye"?
Me: The gland of the third eyelid is prolapsed.
Surgeon: No. What's the gland called?
Students: Nictitating gland?
Surgeon: Yes. And what's wrong with it?
...
Surgeon: It's PROLAPSED


Surgeon: What's a type I open fracture mean? What does the fracture do?
Student: Do?
Surgeon: Where does the bone go?
Student: Uh...?
Surgeon: From the inside to the outside!
Student: How else would the bone go?!


Surgeon: What's the third type of plate?
Students: It makes a bridge.
Surgeon: Yes but what's it called?
Students: A... bridge plate?
*Surgeon starts drawing*
Surgeon: Picture Notre Dam. These things off to the side that support it.
*Draws big arches*
Students: Arches? Scaffold?
*Surgeon writes B _ _ _ _ _ _ _*
Students: Bridge! Bulwark! A! E! O!
*Head shaking*
Students: U!
*Writes B U _ _ _ _ S S*
Students: Buttress!


Surgeon: What type of screws would you use?
Student: Small ones.

Professors: Viruses

Our virology professor was this sweet, tall, Polish woman. I probably liked her lectures 10x more just because of her accent.

My classmates didn't really like virology, because it was basically learning a long list of viruses. We went through a bunch of families, learning a bunch of details about one virus after another. It was also in this horrible room where the desk is slanted and there's not much space between it and the seats. This means that  not only do all your pens and papers slide off the desk, you can't really bend down to get it. If you try, the only option is basically planting your face in your neighbour's lap.

The best part about virology was that she regularly showed us videos in class. I say it's the best part, because it was interesting and a good way to learn, but it was also terrifying. Early on, when we were doing the more routine viruses, they were more simple videos about diagnosis and transmission etc. Then, as we got to the horrible, deadly, zoonotic viruses, we got to see documentaries about how scary and bad such viruses are. For instance there was an emerging virus in Australia that killed some horses... and then the vet who did the post mortem. And the horse's trainer. This was a brand new virus that no one knew about, and now they've done a lot of science and figured out it's in the same family as other wonderful diseases such as canine distemper and rinderpest. Then there was that virus's friend, in pigs in Malasia, that everyone thought was something else transmitted by mosquitoes. So they gave all the pig workers lots of mosquito protection, but a bunch of people died anyway, and they had to quarantine the pig farms and destroy the pigs. Both of those viruses are actually transmitted by fruit bats, particularly their faeces.

Then, of course, there are the fun videos about rabies, documenting not only rabid animals, but rabid people, including interviewing the one girl who is the only person ever to survive it. It kills a significant number of people every year, largely in Africa I believe. That girl had been bitten by a bat (I think she lived in the US), and didn't think to take any precautions. When she came down with the symptoms later, they went through great heroics, and eventually saved her by inducing a coma and keeping the virus from replicating in her nervous system.

Somehow, these things didn't seem to phase our professor. She was as excited about viruses as I think people can get. When she showed us a frightening video about ebola, she was saying how that sort of crazy, big-deal virus that everyone hears about was what got her interested in the discipline initially. You know, the ones that kill practically everybody that catches them. I agree that they are fascinating but I don't think I would be able to sleep at night if I studied them.

I think the thing I learned most from that class was never, ever touch a bat. And it is probably also a good idea to never, ever visit Africa either.

Being On the Other Side (Part 2)

My job teaching the second year anatomy labs included taking part in the oral examination at the end on topography, which is using external landmarks to identify the location of structures that you can't see. That basically means, if you point anywhere on a dog, I should be able to tell you exactly what is there and what it does. I made a post about it when I had to go through this--it's the first oral exam of the degree!

They use the third year students as scribes. So the professor asks the questions, and the scribe copies down what the student says, so there's some sort of record. This concept was terrifying as an examinee: some older and more knowledgable student hiding in the corner of the room, watching you silently and making notes.

If I had known what it was like behind the scenes, I doubt I would have been so nervous.

For one thing, there is NO space to write. Every student gets one line on the sheet, and each question gets a box (four or five questions each). So I had to condense 2-3 minutes of nervous speed-talking into a box the size of my thumbnail. Well, I guess the details aren't so important after all.

The examiner I was paired with was the other ridiculous factor. He's well known as a ridiculous professor (not in a good way), rather lackadaisical. He was completely relaxed and probably a bit bored, since he had to examine student after student all day long, which was an interesting contrast to the complete terror of the poor second years coming into the room. By the end of the afternoon, he was yawning and joking about beer, as some poor sould who'd been waiting tensely for the entire morning stares at him, pale and waiting for it to all be over. Their minds blanked, they stuttered and misspoke, some went really fast, some had massive pauses. But frankly, most of them were 4/5 or above on every question. The lowest person still scored an overall 70% or so.

What really amazed me was that Prof Lackadaisical wasn't really paying attention. Most of them, the grading process pretty much consisted of the student leaving the room, and he turns to me and says "Yeah, she was fine, 5/5 for everything." As the afternoon stretched on, however, I had to point out things like "Well she DID call this thing this totally-other-thing" and he'd be all "Oh. 4/5 then." Eventually we got to him turning to me and asking "How was that one? Was she right?" and I became the sole arbiter of their grades. So, really, they had nothing to worry about, because it depended on both me and him remembering what the person said, and all the details falling through the cracks in the floor because I had only written like 10% of what they said in the first place. Well, that, and the fact that they all had studied and knew what they were talking about.

Professors: Lecture is a Bedtime Story

In second semester this year, we began our only single semester paper: Poultry, Fish, and Wildlife Management and Disease. It has a fancy name, but the class is really relaxing. The topics are very different and thoughtful and involve a lot of guest speakers. For example, we had two lectures on zoo medicine, a lecture by a lady who went to work with fur seals in some very exotic places only accessible by boat, and some thoughtful lectures on wildlife reservoirs of scary human diseases. We recently had a lecture on care of aquarium fish, we talked a bit about toxins in the food chain, and we even had some lectures on how to tell which predator killed an animal. (In case you are wondering, it involves clues from what organs/areas, if any, were eaten, and measuring the distance between puncture marks from the canine teeth).

I am not sure how to convey this in writing, but our lecturer's voice is like a lullaby. He's got this wonderful soft, soothing voice. It doesn't matter what he says, it sounds like a bedtime story.

Professors: In-credible

One of our anatomy professors is a little suspicious. Fortunately he only gives one or two lectures a semester, and mostly he's just there to confuse people in lab. At first he made me scratch my head, but now he's lost most of his credibility.

The first hint that he is actually clueless was first year. We were learning the nerves of the hind limb, and there was an unlabeled prosection showing them very nicely. One of the nerves was wonky, nothing we'd learned about at the time, so we asked this guy what it was. He said it was the ischiatic nerve. It was actually the pudendal nerve. Now, if you don't know what those are, the ischiatic nerve goes down your leg. The pudendal nerve goes over the back of the pelvis. If you think about the way a dog is set up, that's like a ninety degree angle between the two, and they're not even close to each other. There's pretty much no way anyone could get them confused.

Since then, he has said a lot of things that made us wonder if he knows what he's talking about, but nothing really stood out to me until a few anatomy labs ago. This was one where we had live horses in stalls and were palpating muscles and ligaments in their front legs. There were four people to a horse, two to each leg.

The pair across from me and my partner comes over asking if we found the styloid processes. If you feel the two bumps on your wrist (especially the one on the outside that you can see and kind of defines the wrist), those are the ends of the radius and ulna, known as the styloid processes. Other mammals have the same thing. So I said yes, we had felt them, and the other pair says that this professor had told them they're not palpable. He'd told them that what they were, in fact, feeling was the epicondyles. Er... there are no epicondyles of the radius and ulna. They don't exist, they're not there. Epicondyles are the name for the bony protuberances in other bones, like humerus and femur. And seriously. You can feel your wrists. Horses are build the same way. The styloid processes are undeniably, obviously palpable.

However the best thing that happened was this. This isn't so much him getting anatomy blatantly wrong, as just  going to show how little help he is.

On the upper forelimb, it's kind of hard to tell the muscles apart. There's a lot of them and they're somewhat confusing, so we got the nearest professor to come over and help us. Three guesses who.

So my partner asks him to clarify the muscles, and I bend down to show him which ones we think we can identify. Our horse is finicky about being touched in that area and also tired of being palpated for three hours, so she turns around and tries to bite me. All she managed to do was tap me with her nose since I was in a reasonably safe position. Since I wasn't facing her head and so didn't see that she was actually trying to bite me, my partner tells me to watch out.

Professor's answer to our question: "Watch your back first. ;)"

Then he leaves.

My partner looks at me. "I'm pretty sure I asked him the question," she says after a time.

Had to get another professor to explain the muscles to us.

Professors: Three Stances

Mr. Yorkshire accent who teaches nutrition is a cute old guy with messy white hair who not only uses the overhead projector, he doesn't know how to turn the computer projector off (so the computer's log-in screen isn't in the way) and has to have a student do it for him. He also calls the overhead transparents "acetates." I thought that was an acid with two carbons, but ok.

He has three, and only three, stances that he assumes during lecture.

Stance 1: This professor's most common state is with his hands level at his face. I think this is to emphasize his point. All his points, really. He looks into the middle distance, hands up to the sky, palms towards him, as if he's pleading with heaven, for pretty much most of the lecture.

Stance 2: This is interesting because his posture when he uses a pointer to point at the overhead is exactly the same every single time. He always turns to face the screen, puts his left hand on his hip, has the laser pointer in his right arm, and bends his right elbow keeping it level with his hip. He assumes this stance whenever he points to tables and graphs on his "acetates."

Stance 3: Whenever he needs to list something, such as benefits of a certain thing, his hands do drop below face level to a more normal position. He holds out fingers with his left hand and taps them with his right, just like anyone would do when counting out a list. Strangely, no matter how many points there are, he seems to get stuck on the third finger. If there are four points, he will just tap his third finger twice. It is important to note that these are fairly large, exaggerated list-counting-tapping movements.

A common cycle seen in his lectures is to begin with Stance 1 describing a topic, and switching to Stance 2 to point at a table that has data concerning this topic, then move to Stance 3 to list out key points. He will then return to Stance 1 to bring his point home, and the cycle restarts.

Professors: Raktajino

For the physiology of lactation, I rather liked the professor. He was this tall, skinny, middle-aged fellow, and he seemed pretty gay if you ask me. He definitely had some of the mannerisms and gestures. Anyway, his section was pretty challenging, but I liked him.

During his last lecture, he told us about the "tap reflex," which is where the calf bunts its mother's udder, which causes a reflex contraction and milk let-down. He mentioned that if you google tap reflex, there's a very different one that involves human males and erections, so he warned us that we would have a hard time finding information about the milk one on the internet. Now, I googled tap reflex and all I got were results for the knee-jerk reflex, so I don't know what he's talking about, but that's not important.

He was about to continue on with the lecture, when one of the outgoing members of our class says, "What do you tap?" This elicits a round of laughter, and she adds, "Just curious you know, since you brought it up..."

The professor smiles and is obviously not about to go into it, so he kind of waves off the question. Then one of the Americans (male) in the back pipes up with, "I'll show you later."

End that story, start new story.

We were given a practice test and access to the old exams, and one section was a matching question, where you match the words to the best description. He wanted to use all the letters of the alphabet I guess, because down at the bottom there were some made up answers. One of them sounded like an old god or some relation to C'thulu. The other was Raktajino.

Now, at this point I was just getting into Deep Space Nine (I am now a fan). I saw that, and I thought, "Hmmm... that's suspicious." I looked it up, and I'm pretty sure Raktajino is not a real thing, the only possible definition is a Klingon coffee. He's a Trekkie! Unfortunately, he didn't put it on our exam, so I didn't get the chance to make a comment.

One question he did put on, was "What percent lactose does human milk contain?"

• 5%
• 7%
• 9%
• 11%

Um. What? Ok, there was a table in the study guide, but it had like 30 species on it, and had values for a good handful of milk components (like percent protein or percent fat). I'd learned that human milk has a higher than average lactose concentration, but not the exact percent, jeez! How will that knowledge ever help me? Even if it were asking about sheep milk, I don't see how that's useful, but no, he's asking vet students about human milk composition. He lost all his cool points for that one.

Professors: Class Should Be Over Now

Our professor for renal physiology was pretty good, except for one huge pet peeve of mine. She always, consistently, without fail, every time went over the time limit. I don't just mean two or three minutes, I'm talking five to eight minutes over.

This is of course a nuisance because we have to get to our next class, and it's especially bad if you need to run a quick errand, such as grabbing something from your locker in the vet tower or getting a drink from the student shop. What really gets me though is that I found I often fill up two sheets of paper, both sides, in the space of a lecture. In a lecture like physiology with a lot of information, I will be right at the end of my second sheet of paper when those fifty minutes are up.

What happened to me was that every single one of her lectures went over time enough that I couldn't fit all the extra info into the margins of my page. I had to either write really, really small and/or cramped, or start a new page. I hate starting a new page when all I will have is a paragraph at the top on one side. I hate it!

This flaw almost drove me mad. It happened every time.

Professors: Yeay

One of our genetics professors is remarkably boring and useless, but his accent does spice up class. Here is a collection of some of his more interesting pronunciations: (bolded my favorites)

A: yeay
Acquired: ackweid
Allergy: allegedly (maybe closer to allege-ly)
Animals: aneeMALs
Both: boat
Class three: glass tree
Consumer: conzoomer
Determine: dee-ter-MINE
Develop: double-up
Digestion: dilezhion
Domain: domayan
Epidemics: epida-mix
First: fahst
H: hech or het, depending (MHC is em-het-see or m'etsee)
Homologous: homo-log-us
Lamb: lamp
Lengthy: lendy
Liquid: lickvid
Linkage: engage
Memory: mammary
Progenitor: progen-ate-or
Questions: quotients
Recessive: recessill
Reject: rezhect
Resilience: res-eye-lee-ence
Respiratory: resprayrty
Response: resp-ow-nce
Successive: successill
Surface: suhfass
Those: dos
Those breeds: dosbrees
Through: true
Two hours: two owvus
Vaccines: vaxin
Vomiting: vomishion
Which: veech
X: yecks

If you don't understand, don't worry, he will explain you later.

Professors: Scratchy Voice

I really liked studying the cardiovascular system last year, but the lectures were a little bit taxing on the ears.

The professor that taught us about it was this old, high-pitched little lady whose appearance and voice reminded me an awful lot of Delores Umbridge in that Harry Potter movie. Her ridiculously scratchy voice made it very difficult to concentrate on anything she was actually saying.

Something that I really didn't understand about her is why she always used human information, images, and studies. Some things, you do have to depend on studies based around human medicine, because no one ever thought to figure it out for domestic animals, but the heart is not one of those things. It's pretty central to things being alive. My guess is that she either is too lazy to look for a veterinary textbook, or she didn't get accepted to med school and is still bitter about it.

There are pictures of animal hearts in my anatomy textbook, I don't see how she could possibly have a hard time finding one. If there's a basic diagram of a person, why couldn't she put a picture of an animal to show the same thing? I just don't understand.

Professors: The Little Professor That Could

One of our professors is an adorable, round little bald guy. He's super nice and cares for all his students. What does he teach? Grass.

As a subset of Nutrition, we have a once weekly lecture on agronomy. That's basically learning about grass and pasture. You'd be surprised at how passionate some people can get about grass. The lectures are pretty good, and they're interesting except for the fact that they are about grass.

This guy cares so much for his students. He's willing to spend as much time as anyone needs to teach them about grass, saying that we pay enough to get as much one-on-one time as it takes. We have an assignment to do that involves a lot of work in spreadsheets, and he constructed a fancy template, examples, and even set it up so if we enter data points into the template they will automatically form a graph. Before giving us any problems, he pretends he's a student and does them himself to make sure they're reasonable. Even during lectures, he's always commenting on the body language, and if people look too bored he'll adjust the lecture accordingly. He'll also make sure to give us as much extra readings and resources as any A+ student could ever want. Before our physiology midterm, he cancelled his class, since it was on the same day.

How much friendlier could you get! Once, he responded an email of mine, and then sent a second email saying, "PS, keep smiling!"

He does go a bit overboard. I guess he wasn't very good at math when he was growing up because he goes entirely out of his way to make sure we understand any calculations we may need to do. This would be fair, except for the fact that they are some of the most basic equations you can get. It's not really necessary to explain how to plug in numbers, or describe the equation for a line. However, he's very concerned that we might find it patronizing, and will give a polite explanation of why he feels the need to go into detail about something.

One thing that's pretty funny is he likes to toot his own horn every so often. He'll make some comment like, "Back when I was an undergrad, I wasn't a straight A's honors student because I regurgitated formulas. I learned the concepts behind them."

One time, a slide of his read that a farmer had purchased a "fairy farm" instead of a "dairy farm." I didn't notice at first, but I did hear muffled laughter around the room. Poor guy was just as confused as I was, until finally he changed slides and someone pointed out the mistake. He was pretty embarrassed, but that's a great typo if you ask me.

There's something just really cute about everything he says. I think it's a combination of his concern that everyone understands everything and is interested in what he's teaching, and the fact that he's teaching about grass. He often waffles around with anecdotes, grinning about a study or a discussion about a colleague he wants to tell us about. The other day, he went off on a side story, prefacing it with, "As an aside with a smile..." Adorable!

Now, if he were teaching anatomy or physiology, we'd be all set.

Professors: Amino Acids

This year, we have a double-semester course about animal nutrition. At first, there was this cheerful old guy teaching us, but then we started a new topic and, with it, got a new lecturer.

His lectures were endless, life-sucking stretches of white slides with black text. He would agonizingly read out every bullet point, talking very slowly in an American accented drawl. He spent half an hour on a single slide one time. Going to his class really didn't offer much return on the time investment, because in your own time you could easily go over at least three of his lectures in the space of an hour. His slow speech did make me laugh out loud once, when he switched to a new slide and it sounded like a complete statement when he said, "This is another slide."

Unbelievably, he was teaching faster than he expected. Despite giving us enough information for half a lecture (especially if you compare to our other classes, such as fast forward textbook lady), he was well ahead of schedule. We got two classes off because of this.

One day, he had to be out of town, so he had a guest lecturer fill in. I guess he didn't trust that guy to have done a good job, because the next class, he spent a good portion of time going over what the guest lecturer had discussed.

I mentioned that he had an American drawl. However, his accent was a little funny. He pronounced amino acids as "am-eye-no" acids. Wait, what? I have never heard anyone pronounce them like that. "a-mee-no" or "ay-meeno" sure, but "am-eye-no"? He said it so often, it became his defining feature.

Professors: Audio Textbook on Fast Forward

One of our anatomy lecturers is a friendly Indian woman who may have missed the point about what a lecture is supposed to be.

Unfortunately, even if she were the most amazing lecturer ever, she's quite difficult to understand. During one of her lectures last year, it actually took me and my friend a good portion of the lecture to realise that the "eesofaygus" is the esophagus. In another lecture, I discovered that the "vasheena" is the vagina.

Even more unfortunately, she is not the most amazing lecturer ever. I know this is vet school and we learn large quantities of information in any given lecture, but most of the time professors put emphasis on key points. This lady tried to fit the entire textbook chapter on the eye into one 50 minute lecture. There was no reiteration of points, no emphasis, she was just spewing facts and details like a fountain. In order to cram everything in, there was never any halt in the flow of words. Did she breathe during that entire lecture? I'm not sure.

That lecture was pretty much the textbook on audio-book. On fast forward.

Professors: Very Severe Suffering

One of my most memorable professors from last year was the one that taught the welfare component of Animal Behaviour, Handling, and Welfare (for some handling stories go here or here).

He was this little white-haired guy and the odds were against him from the start, with lectures at 8am. He seemed like a normal professor at first, but over time the offensive parts of his personally started emerging. It became clear that he was a pretty opinionated guy, but the funny part was that most of his audience disagreed with him.

I suppose the best way to explain it would be to start with one of the concepts he presented (in a very black and white, biased manner), which was the gold standard approach to welfare. There is the "incremental approach," which is the reasonable method of taking small steps, improving a little bit at a time, working up to an end goal (in this case, better animal welfare). In contrast, there's the "gold standard" approach, which is where the people setting the rules have an absolute standard and anything below it is unacceptable. The way he presented it, he also implied that these gold standards are usually completely unreasonable.

Going off of that concept, he was very much against animal rights advocates, claiming that they have a "gold standard" view of animal welfare, that no animals should ever be used for anyone's gain ever, and any food industry or research involving animals should be ended. Anyone who's for animal rights feels exactly like that, of course. Then he would argue that animal welfare advocates, like himself, were the only sensible ones, and subscribe to the incremental approach.

He took this a step farther by making a slightly derogatory statement about "liberal tree-hugging, museli-eating vegetarians." I think the oversight in that particular lecture was that in a class full of vet students, there's a pretty good percent of people that identify with that at least a little bit. I mean, are you really likely to be in vet school if you're like "screw animal rights!" and go around kicking trees and hating vegetarians?

Apart from this guy's confidence in being right, he was also amazingly patronizing on a daily basis. He had obviously rehearsed jokes that he would crack and then laugh at, and seemed to think no one else laughed because they didn't get it. An excellent example was:

"The masochist said to the sadist, 'Beat me!' And the sadist said, 'No.' ... You should look those words up in a dictionary when you go home."

It's not that joke wasn't funny, it's that we didn't know what those words meant. Definitely.

Another great example was the last lecture he gave, which was about ethics. It was extremely boring because it was all just common sense stuff that some smug person had decided to arbitrarily assign specific names and definitions. Then when you talk about it using those terms you sound all high and mighty, I guess, because you know all about ethics (and others don't). That's exactly the impression he gave, anyway. He told us four or five times during the lecture that we should hold on to these notes and take another look at them in fifth year.

He actually said that we would understand them then. He clearly didn't think we understood them at the time; I mean, after all, we were only first years so what would we know about ethics?

The last interesting points about him have to do with his actual teaching. Again, an example is the best way I can describe it. Here is a scale you can use to discuss animal welfare:

• No suffering
• Mild suffering
• Moderate suffering
• Severe suffering
• Very severe suffering

I don't think much else needs to be said.

Despite all these things I've told you about, and many interesting things we learned in class, guess what his two 20-point questions were on the final exam? 

1. List 10 pros and 10 cons of keeping layer hens in cages.

2. List 8 pros and 8 cons of keeping sows in stalls.

What made this even more dumbfounding was that this is the sort of thing that the table in the study guide said:

Disadvantages of layer hens in cages:

• Birds are not able to fly
• Birds are not able to run
• Birds are not able to stretch their wings
• Birds are not able to walk continuously
• Birds are not able to forage
• Birds have a limited ability to fly

The exam questions were pretty much lose-lose.

Professors: Respiratory Physiology Cough Cough

Last year in physiology, we studied the lungs with an old geezer of a professor. Now, sometimes old professors are adorable, but that wasn't the case.

For some reason, this fellow is a respiratory physiologist and a massive smoker. I don't know how he does it, and it totally gutted his credibility. If you didn't actually catch him smoking outside of class, you could easily tell by his constant coughing. For a lecturer, that's bad enough in its own right, but try and imagine his whole persona:

We have a tall, skinny, dinosaur lurching back and forth across the lecture hall as he tells us about the lungs. He warbles on about a graph from some study in the 70s, which is obviously a scanned photocopy of a photocopy, punctuated by a good cough every here and there. He'd often have a hand clutching his chest, and I don't know if I can even describe how slowly he speaks. You can tell that he's thinking while he's talking instead of beforehand, because there are huge pauses between every few words.

One time, he was saying something along the lines of, "Here... we can see... that... there are..." and the suspense just kept building. What is it about! I want to know! 

Taking all that together, we kept waiting for him to keel over one day. After all, he looked like a stiff breeze might knock him over. His lectures weren't very good, but there was this morbid curiosity that kept us interested: "Is he going to snuff it today?" At the end of his very last lecture, I'm not sure if it was a relief or a disappointment that he'd struggled through the entire lecture series without incident.

Another classic downfall of his lectures is that, despite being decent at the computer, his resources and references are ancient. Unlike many dinosaur professors, he can successfully manage a powerpoint presentation (although he wasn't sure how to turn it into a slide show--that seems to be a common problem), but he's definitely living in the past. All of his graphs and images were from studies done decades ago. I'm pretty sure he got a lot of his diagrams from an old human physiology textbook that's not in print anymore, or at least is very obscure and old.

He had some weird device to demonstrate a property of the lungs, which I'm pretty sure was something like a condom tied with string in a clear plastic tube. He encouraged people to try it (you had to blow into it), but I doubt you'll be surprised to hear no one did.