humor...

Is it wrong to find the story below extremely funny? I can't help but feel a little guilty...

From an Immunology professor (partly parapharased, partly quoted--all in quotations):
(imagine hearing this in a heavy British accent)

"I used to have a neighbor, you see, whose wife was sick, and he took her to the doctor to find out what was wrong. Now, I tell you, this doctor--well he's just terrible, absolutely terrible, and well I certainly would not want to be his patient. Anyway, this neighbor of mine had been waiting for his wife's results for some time now, and he was getting rather worried. He'd asked me to go and ask the doctor what was wrong, but of course I can't, you know, because of HIPPA (? sp), and patient confidentiality and all. So I told him, while he was over at my house, just to call the doctor and hear what he says, and maybe I can help interpret some things for him. So my neighbor did call this doctor, and you know, the doctor was just terrible, and he said: "well now I'm so sorry but I've just seen about 60 patients today and I've got no idea which patient is your wife." My neighbor, you know, ever so polite, patiently reminded the doctor that his wife's name was Rose, Rose M. Keller. This doctor then replied, "well, I've got 2 patients here with the name Rose M. Keller, but I can't tell which is your wife...one's got Alzheimer and the other's got AIDs." As you can probably understand, my poor neighbor was then pretty distraught and asked" doctor, this is terrible news, what am I supposed to do, does my wife have AIDs or Alzheimer?" this doctor, (he's terrible, I tell you, absolutely terrible) replied," Well here's what you do: you send her to the market, you see, and if she comes back, don't have sex with her."

The above is a joke. My prof is hilarious.

reflection on missed opportunities

There's no use regretting the past, because regretting doesn't change much. But what if you could re-live aspects of your past? What would you do differently?

Granted the above is an obtuse statement, but in my case, that's exactly what I'm doing. I'm revisiting my alma mater every weekend, hanging out with friends who have not graduated. In a cinch: I'm reliving Harvard. Why? Because not everyone gets a second chance, and there are compromises that I will not make anymore.

This weekend is the Head of the Charles, and the swell of school spirit moved me to put on my House's scarf, wearing it proudly because I didn't have my red Harvard one. At the risk of being mistaken for a Dartmouth student (those poor deprived kids in the woods of NH--tisk tisk) with my green and white garb, I headed proudly down to the River Houses that line one bank of the Charles, brushing pass a sea of Crimson pride in the form of red gortex worn by everyone from babies to alumni. The weekend was also host to a friend's b-day party, the typical kind of Harvard gathering that included good cheap wine from Trader Joe's, great cheeses, and the random conversation about post-modernism sprinkled with references to vaginas and penises. To think, I barely went to any of these things when I was in college. I was either too busy with extracurriculars, studying for biology exams, applying to internships, cramming for the MCAT, or applying to medical school. It's a sad feedback loop really, because once you have decided that as a pre-med you must limit your exposure to the outside world, fewer and fewer friends will want to invite you to go out. More to the point, pretty soon this pattern begins to seem normal: it's normal to stay in on the weekend, it's normal to take classes you hate because you think it'll help the GPA or do extracurriculars that you have a mild interest in but decides that it will look good on a resume--it's normal to be goal driven and targeted at the exclusion of your personal preferences for life.

My revolt against this line of masochistic devotion to 'medicine' happened near the end of college, but it was too little too late. I wished I'd taken more classes I liked, picked another concentration (major), maybe even quit whatever that wasn't working for me and tried something else. But would I still be where I am today had I made these different choices? I'm not sure, but there's plenty of annectodal evidence that had I made different choices I'd still be fine. All I know is that I would have been happier, and that, today, would make all the difference in the world.

Artbreak

Just finished 2 exams on Monday; gearing up for another round of exams this coming Tuesday. We have at least 1 exam every week now, until the end of the semester. I can't say that I have as much free time now as I did at the beginning of the year, but substantive changes to my routines are minimal. The exams have not gotten harder, just simply more material to cover in one sitting. Honestly, one really should never have to be that intimate with phosphofructokinase I, like--ever. I'm glad I know what makes enzymes in the cycles of intermediate metabolism tick--really, it's a great novelty. Having to memorizing all of their names, functions, products, and pathways however, was just masochistic.

The weekly visit to the Museum of Fine Arts, and the art class, is keeping me sane. As a friend and fellow medical student in the program said, "Every week, this is my 3 hours of relaxation. It's so great to just be able to engage your brain in a different way..." I couldn't agree with her more.

We had a visitation today by a poet, Erica Funkhouser. She's currently teaching at MIT, and studied under Robert Lowell at one point. Her poems remind me of Elizabeth Bishop's, but less multifaceted. She didn't really answer any of my questions about her poetry, really, which was a bit frustrating, but I guess that not all poets have developed philosphies about their artform's engagement with other artforms. What I really wanted to get from her was her sense of the differences/sameness between poetic imagery and photography/the visual arts, because so much of her work seems (in a cinch) to invoke the visual language of the photograph--in terms of framing, details, and visual metaphors.

Oh well.

I have to start seriously thinking about my art installation pretty soon. I'll do that after the Immunology & Cell-Tissue Biology exams next week.

X-rays are tricky....(true story!)

Recently, in our Problem Based Learning (PBL) class we were practicing how to make a diagnosis on a case-study patient. We reviewed some x-rays of the patient in question. The patient is suspected of having liver swelling and thus we were hoping to see on her X-rays an enlarged peritoneal cavity (abdominal area) and a decrease in size of her thoraxic cavity (chest area) due to the organs in the peritoneal cavity pushing up against the diaphram.

Anyway, one of my friend, upon viewing two x-rays, proclaimed loudly to the class: "This profile image of her abdominal and thoraxic regions clearly shows that her liver is greatly distended. Just look at that, it's practically outside of her body!"

The rest of us, meanwhile, looked at each other confusingly and said, " Eric, what do you mean? Where do you see the liver outside of her body?"

Eric replied, pointing to a large globular mass on the x-ray: "see here, this is her peritoneal cavity, and isn't that her liver all distended?"

After several seconds of awkward silence, finally, someone replied:" Um dude...that's her breast."

True story!!!

It's a sad state of affairs...

So today in my interviewing class we had a lecture on how to talk to patients on issues of sexuality. The interviewing class is meant as a course to teach students the art of talking to patients and present models for discussing various sensitive topics having to do with a patient's health and life quality. Before the lecture began, the following 'disclaimer' was displayed for all of us to see. It is a message from the Attorney General of the United States. It might as well could have come from communist China:

" The Attorney General of the United States has reviewed the content of this lecture. This material is deemed to be undermining of the values of the United States. The government does not sanction dissemination of sexually explicit information. Only information that deals with abstinence until marriage [man+ woman] will be tolerated."
(bold typeface added for emphasis)


I am appalled, shocked, digusted, to say the least. Mind you, this type of information is to be disseminated to health care providers (or in our case, potential health care providers) so that we may know how to deal with patients in the real world. These broad, sweeping edicts issued from on high to prevent access to life saving information (check it out for yourself; try to go find information on sexuality/sexual health on government websites...the information is scant, if any exists) is greatly demoralizing. Thankfully, health care providers in the real world ignores pretty much all of this. I don't think anybody grounded in the real world could.

To say that the material undermines the values of the United States beckons the question: what are the values of the United States nowadays? Do we live in George Orwell's 1984, or am I still in the nation that embraces freedom of information and embrace of dialogue and reason?

I don't think I want to know.

Sleep

I've fallen back into my old bad habits of wasting time and sleeping late. This is a problem now, as I feel more tired during the day, and less productive at night. I feel even more bad because the lack of sleep isn't necessarily from cramming for exams (I haven't cram for anything yet)...it's more about wasting time at odd hours when I should be sleeping.

A friend of mine, meanwhile, gave me some wise words as we were on our way to interview a patient because she thinks being tired is symptomatic of the onset of a cold:

"Seriously, everyone's been getting sick. We need to drink more water to have more mucus!"

..umm...yeah.