"I Always Miss the Cool Stuff..."

Do you remember the time when you were a girl from Mars? I don’t know if you knew that.

I agree with Chris. The Pistons are hard to watch this season.

The Apples in Stereo’s new CD, New Magnetic Wonder, has the classic Apples in Stereo sound. Their previous album, The Velocity of Sound, kind of diverged from their style. I enjoy The Velocity of Sound, but I think New Magnetic Wonder is a better CD in all aspects from production to song writing. My favorite song is Skyway. Everyone should check out this CD.

I’m doing excellent with one of my New Year’s resolution, eliminating road rage. In the 2007 I have not once yelled or raised my voice while driving. I’m dropping the ball with the other one’s though.

Thanks Jacob for fixing my Internet. You are way better than Geek Squad and a lot cooler. Fuck Geek Squad.

Why does everyone think dating a doctor would be good? It could be just the opposite. Which I guess would be bad, or ungood.

On Tuesday the New York Times reviewed a book that discussed the racism that has occurred in medicine in the United States. Some of the topics discussed were the infamous Tuskegee experiments in which physicians did not treat syphilis in African American men from 1932-1972 to see the natural progression of the disease and James Marion Sims cruel surgical experiments. Harriet A. Washington’s book, The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans From Colonial Times to the Present, also warns of new abuses occurring in the medical community, such as pharmaceutical companies testing medications in Africa in poor populations as well as experimental surgeries in countries with less medical-legal oversight. I have read similar books discussing the racism in psychiatry/psychology; Even the Rat was White by Robert V. Guthrie and Don’t Believe the Hype by Farai Chideya. Every profession I seem to study or in which I am involved has a dark history of racism. That’s no good.

“I always miss the cool stuff,” another medical student said to me on Tuesday as I was walking back from the radiology department where I left my white coat. Every medical student, intern and resident wants to see as much as possible as far as disease and illnesses are concerned. There were the maggot incidents while I was on infectious disease at Henry Ford and frequently medical students are asked to go see interesting cases even when he/she may not be part of the team managing the patient’s care. Tuesday in the Emergency Department, I was involved in a very intense case (I can’t go into details for all the confidentiality reasons) and the patient’s prognosis was/is very bleak. As I finally got a chance to sit down and catch my breath I thought about the comment from my medical student colleague. I have said that same thing a million times, but it was different today. I thought about how I gathered the clothes of this patient and gave them to the patient’s family as they were trying to come to terms with what had happened. Then I thought about how scary this has to be if you have no medical knowledge of what is happening. When I got home and decompressed I realized that saying that really shows the lack of empathy and the immunity individuals in the medical profession develop in a rather short period. It’s no one’s fault, it just happens after seeing sick people over and over again. However, I won’t say, “I always miss the cool stuff,” ever again. I want to be a part of life saving measures and do everything that can be done for a very sick patient, but it really isn’t “cool.” It is rarely a good thing to be an interesting case in medicine.