Daylight saving(s)

I spend too much time reading fan fiction.

Psychiatry has been bleeding into neurosurgery for the past few weeks. Are you more interested in the driver or the car? What about the music playing in the car? What's driving the driver? Does it matter that it's easier to fix a car? (Is neurology even real.) This metaphor has fallen apart after much dissection. I really hope the guy I talked to on the psych ward doesn't have Creutzfeld-Jakob. (Dramatic med school patient story!! He probably doesn't.)

"The language of DSM-IV has become so influential in the discussion of mental disorders that the categories have been reified. Rather than being guidelines that attempt to gather similar individuals together, they have come to represent real entities (as is God created a specific disorder [such as Generalized Anxiety Disorder] while he or she was creating rose bushes)." -our psychiatry professor

"It's not ambiguous. If he looks like he has schizophrenia, he has schizophrenia." -favorite neurosurgery resident

"I'm confused. Brains are for cutting." -another resident

Last medical thing: peds. Sudden realizations came one after the other yesterday. Kids get better. They have full decades before them, not a few months of questionable quality. But don't bring an iPad near their heads. 

Election fatigue. I voted a few weeks ago and have somehow even convinced my mother to vote. Amelia and I saw Billy C, so that was exciting. Big Bird was there too. 

Time flies when you have (made and) eaten so much spinach tortellini today. So much. Oh, I also got locked in a stairwell the other day and finally got out via an emergency exit, climbing through a hedge, and clambering over a wall. All while holding brain slices. True story.

The Last Month

About to leave for a couple weeks of Quality Family Time as well as getting six more countries under my belt! Excited. I am excited for this school year too. If last year was about learning to even recognize what a building block is, then hopefully this year we'll learn how to put the blocks together.

I know I have told most of you about how awesome my lab is, but here is a reiteration: my lab is awesome. I am such a fan of everyone there, and the whole environment is so different from my previous lab. Also, paper(s) in the works, so keep your fingers crossed and eyes peeled!

Gratuitous sampling of lab lexicon (mostly so I don't forget):

• Warsh (penalties for saying "wash" instead)
• Yestuhday
• Quite good ("quite" means "sort of" rather than "very" in British English!)
• The grapes are in the fridge. (shhh)
• I'm sick of this shhhit. (must be said in eastern European accent)
• Not sports cars, but luxury cars
• You're weak and unmarried!
• Whenever a med student is mentioned, one must mutter, "Bloody medical students, can't get away from them!"

We get so much science done.

Arrogance

Neurosurgery is an arrogant profession. Astronomers study the stars but never touch them. Particle physicists see God in the vapor trails of their atom-smashers, but cannot see the particles themselves, cannot reach into protons and feel the quarks with their fingers...These scientists must be content with the shadow nature casts upon their instruments and photographic emulsions. But not the neurosurgeon, for whom the greatest mystery of creation resides in a few pounds of greasy flesh and blood. Only the neurosurgeon dares to improve upon five billion years of evolution in a few hours.

- Frank Vertosick Jr., When the Air Hits Your Brain

From the back cover, the part I don't want to think about:
"He retired from surgery due to Parkinson's disease in 2002..."

From a lecture on dying:
"You don't really have to pay taxes. You can evade those. But everyone, everyone, gets sick and dies."

Summer means immersion, reading for fun, finding and sharing as much free food as possible, and avoiding discussion of my impending nuptials (you're all invited!).

I am growing more convinced that schmoozin' is an important, cultivatable skill. Also coffee is so delicious and breakfast joints are the best joints.


Italics!!!!!1!

Almost there

I just saw a picture of spilled purple glitter and thought it was a poorly-differentiated carcinoma. Also, all sidewalks look like they have leukocyte infiltration these days.

Wildly excited for summer, it's only three exams away!

P.S. This blog still exists, apparently.

Confusing

Last week, I scrubbed in on a spine surgery and actually helped the resident with the surgery for a whole hour, a task third-years are only sometimes allowed to do (bragging forever). I even managed to not faint or kill anyone. It was the best thing ever.

Yesterday, I took a quiz and got my lowest score of any med school thing. Is this a wake-up call or something? More studying, less actually-medicine stuff? I'm confused. Back to the books, I guess.

Thoughts, ramblings, and advice welcome, as usual.

Miscellaneous

Hillary update. Love huh. Clinton 2016!!!1!!

I took this strength finder assessment thingy that is supposed to help with career planning. I don't understand how my "top 5" are strengths or how they'll help with career planning; they're just things I do. Highlights:
input (meaning I collect things and facts incessantly) (hoarders, here I come)
intellection (mostly just pretentiousness and an annoying "mental hum"...this also apparently explains why I can't concentrate in quiet places)
activator (meaning I just like starting things, without thinking them through) (oops)

I have been told to partner with Focus and Discipline people. Oops all around.

Incomplete things I've written but not posted (this happens frequently):

from January, on resolutions:
Always more or less the same. Calmness and efficiency. Also, trying to reduce the massive hypocrisy of being in med school while not following the diet and exercise instructions I'm supposed to give other people.

Vegetables. Milk. Yoga. Baby steps? I feel like I've done "baby steps" so many times before.

Caucus = LOL

also January. Sunday "Oof!"s:
obesity & surgical intervention
I once shadowed a bariatric surgeon who told me that he knew a particular patient very well because he had done the weight loss operation (I can't remember if it was a Lap Band or some kind of gastric stapling) on every member of that patient's family. Oof! So many issues raised by this one sentence. I mean, this surgeon was a nice guy. He listened to family members well and really seemed to have his patients' best interests at heart. That being said, it's tough to deny that he's making a buttload of money from doing the same (extremely tedious and boring, I thought) procedure multiple times a day, and it's almost a "family affair" situation. Crazy.

This article, entitled "Young, Obese, and in Surgery", brought up similar squirmy issues for me.
"Medicaid in almost every state and many private health plans now cover bariatric surgery, often more readily than diet or exercise plans."
I do understand that there can be a great deal of genetic influence in metabolic control systems. I also understand that increasing evidence shows that once a person becomes obese, it is extremely likely they will stay that way. It reminded me of a lecture we had on infant and young child development. The professor, a pediatrician, said that there is no such thing as "baby fat" that is normal for a toddle to have. The earlier a child becomes overweight, the more likely they will grow up to be an overweight or obese adult.

from last September apparently:
Is it okay for me to be over people who are "free spirits" and need to "find themselves" and all that jazz? Especially when they're upper middle class, white, and have all the time and resources to do just that. I like watching these people on tv. I don't get it in real life. I don't know how to relate to someone who has wasted so much. This doesn't refer so much to one person as to a general phenomenon. Also, I'm undercaffeinated and this doesn't make sense. I don't get it and I'm tired of trying to get it. There's such a thing as being too open-minded, right? At some point, can I just call someone a loser (in my head)?

Medicine by Dumbledore

"It's not really clear whether this disorder is real or just psychosomatic" + all of psychiatry

Dumbledore says: "Of course it's happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?" 

"The public tends to see death as a game, something you can get out of if you just play your cards right." + end-of-life issues generally

Dumbledore says: "To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure."
and: "Indeed, your failure to understand that there are fates much worse than death has always been your greatest weakness."
Harry's parents' gravestone: "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death"
Beedle the Bard: "And then he greeted Death as an old friend, and went with him gladly, and, as equals, they departed this life."

Pediatric and adolescent medicine

Dumbledore says: "Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young..."

Always applicable

"Alas, earwax!"

Waffle Wednesday

"When the going gets tough, the tough better dig their heels in and take a stand."

file under: awesome things my mother says.

Um, nothing to report on the school front. Classes are classes. We have a test on solving tricky ethics situations, and apparently there are right answers. I ran into my undergrad adviser, who asked if the past two years were "worth it" so I could go straight to med school. (Yes.)

Midterms next week. Breakfast food obsession this week. Every day I'm wafflin'.

Found a folder with cartoons and clippings from 2005. I think this was a solid use of my time.

Whoa

"But if questions about the degree to which medical professions should be adjudicating issues of social identity are not new, they certainly have greater urgency today, for it is getting harder and harder to draw a basic philosophical distinction between the clinic and Clinique...[t]h cycle of anatomical shame attribution and medical normalization seems to be accelerating for all of us."

Assigned reading just got real, y'all.