Germy

The principle that has medicine as an art, in my mind, is what marries the science with the guessing. There have been numerous times in the past few months where we've been told that practicing medicine is really just an investigation that one needs to proceed with to try and arrive at the junction of making a diagnosis with the most information possible. What seems strange to me (or perhaps, felt strange to me) is putting this in the terms of diagnosis being nothing more than a "best guess." Maybe it is the terminology. As I learned the hard way yesterday with a quiz I mis-studied for, the language of medicine is often just renaming principles and structures we already are familiar with, with terms that are often (literally) Greek to me. Had I tried to articulate this idea prior to entering medical school, I could've probably come up with this, but as I've learned over and over, for me, ideas often take awhile to manifest in realization and/or action. I th...

I am now at the point where the reality of what others have testified of, in terms of living a life where almost nothing can occur outside of medicine, is my reality. I'm struggling to fit in sleep, much less running and time with my wife. We have a shortened week at school due to the upcoming Jewish holiday, so I'll be able to catch up on a few things, the least being this blog.

I think the main reason that so many people, especially interacting strangers, end up conversing about the weather is that it is one of the few things that everyone has in common. I don't think that it is a stretch to say that at Kaladi Bros Coffee, every day that I worked had to involved at least a passing comment about the weather -- granted, Denver has some incredible weather and it is one of the things I will miss about the Front Range. The house that my wife and I have in Denver and in which we spent nearly the last four years sat on a hill overlooking Central Denver (we could see the Auroria Campus and the Pepsi Center from the front of the house) and massive storm heads building to the East of town were a sight to behold, for sure. The thing is, the way the house was situated inside, there was really no vantage point for sitting and staring out the window. The room in which the office was set up had a nice view across the Platte River Valley (officially, it is called a ri...

When I was younger, I had two favorite days of the  year, one was Christmas morning, and the other was the first day of Warm Beach Camp. I guess I really don't know young I was. I at least had a firm grasp on how the calendar year works, because, you see I thought it appropriate that since camp usually started the second week or so of July that it provided a nice, balanced bi-annual day of anticipation. Warm Beach Camp is located one of the inner fingers of the Puget Sound, north of Seattle and was a major highlight of the summer. I've been thinking of a time when I went on a horse-back trail ride. I had wanted to go on one for a number of years, only because I had images of full gallops along the water, urging the stallion ever faster. What it ended up being is a long line of horses, 20 or 30 us, with guides interspersed between 3 or 4 of us. The camp itself, sits on a bluff that ends in an abrupt drop of a few hundred feet down to the water of the Sound. The cliff was no...

"Of course it happened to me, because that's just how things go." Do you ever find yourself saying that to yourself whenever something unfortunate happens? I found myself, this afternoon thinking that exact thing, as if my life had been one long string of unfortunate incidents, as if there were a grand scheme to screw everything up for me. This is a dangerous trap; one that is easy to fall into but getting out of posthaste is imperative. So, the last day of block exams we had to deal with three separate exams. The middle one was a doctoring practical that basically was identifying surface anatomy landmarks and palpitation. You know, find the thyroid cartilage, identify the left middle lung (okay, trick question, you got me, there is no left middle lung!) and the auscultation points of the four heart valves, and much more. In fact, we (the students) were provided a page of landmarks that constituted a predetermined set of things we were supposed to know going into the...

This is what this week has felt like. Three more tests tomorrow. Unfortunately one of them is the anatomy practical, for which I am not prepared as I should be. One way or another tomorrow night will get here though.

The following excerpt is not only from the book mentioned, but directly from TrueHoop which is a long standing favorite blog of mine, not only because Henry Abbot is a Portland native but because in my opinion, intelligent discussion involving the NBA is severely lacking (why this is is up for debate, but the vacuum seems to extend from the playgrounds to the mass media) and TrueHoop brings the best commentary together in one place. Anyway, this idea espoused by Michael Jordan is one I've heard before, but recently I've been thinking about the principles in a different manner. Discussion will follow the excerpt. In the book "Driven from Within," Michael Jordan talks about his crunch time mentality: If I miss a shot, so what? Maybe even a shot that could have won a game. I can deal with that. If I don't miss the shot, then I don't miss it -- we win. I can rationalize the fact that there are only two outcomes: You either make it, or you miss it. I ...

I've been thinking for awhile that I really wish I could look inside my body. I not talking about any scope or imaging technique, I'm thinking about actually peeling back the layers and looking at stuff. I look back through my life and for the most part, I've been engaged with some sort of damage inducing activity -- that is, more than just the everyday life toll. When I was a wee lad, I really loved playing soccer and I played on a team for a number of years (4, maybe 6 or 7 years perhaps) and I can remember a few booboos incurred during those Sunday afternoon games. Then I started to fall in love with basketball and I played that all the time. I remember being on a middle school team that took a trip down to Coos Bay, which is on the southern Oregon Coast. In one of the first games I crumpled to the ground after a large pop from what most likely was a dislocation of my patella tendon. Ouch. But up until then, my exploits were nothing more than the expected bumps and br...

So I ordered a skeleton. I used to own a skeleton, but loaned it out not to be seen again. I figured a 3 ft. skeleton on my desk might aid in finding some points of reference during studying. It was sent via FedEx, and according to online tracking was delivered yesterday. I find no package anywhere on the premises, so I call up FedEx and long story short, the driver delivered it to the C&H Sugar Factory (the only C&H factory outside of Hawaii) which is right down the hill. I find it slightly humorous to imagine the employee who opened the package, finding a skeleton lurking inside. The good news is that FedEx says they'll send a driver to retrieve the package and bring it up the hill to my home. Hopefully, unlike my own flesh encased skeleton, all the joints will be well articulated and have a full range of motion. I wanted to bring up a news story I saw this morning, having to do with the US infant mortality rates dropping even further, putting us below nations such as...