Rule of Threes: Music

Three recent albums you should already own:

1. Mumford and Sons - Sigh No More

2. The Black Keys - Brothers

3. Adele - 21

Great line from #2: "I wanted love/but not for myself/but for the girl/so she could love herself."

Three songs with attitude, on heavy rotation:

1. When I Get you Alone - Glee Cast version

2. Forget You - Cee Lo Green

3. Feel Good Drag - Anberlin

Great line from #1 "baby girl, you da shit/that makes you my equivalent."

Three songs recently rediscovered:

1. Tangled Up in Blue - Bob Dylan

2. Crush on Everyone - Jonah Matranga

3. She's not There - The Zombies

Great line from #2 "if you like large intestines/please let me find out."

Three songs I deny are on my Ipod:

1. Represent, Cuba - Studio Sound Ensemble

2. Tonight (I'm loving you) - Enrique Inglesias

3. Haunted - Taylor Swift

Dumbest line from #2: "If I never lied then/baby you'd be the truth."

LOL

hat tip: geekinheels blog.

A little humour...

I find my white coat heavy and it contains: a pager, tiny notebook, pens, penlight, reflex hammer, pocket medicine book, alcohol swabs, my cellphone and a near card. That's light compared to.... The Mr. Always Prepared For Everything Guy. And yes, these students really do exist.

Who knew?

The reservoir for leprosy in the USA is armadillos.

Scorpion stings can cause acute pancreatitis.

pls Reply: none

A grad student sent out an email request today asking other grad students to take a short survey for her biostat final project. She sent it to all the grad students at UofM. One person, who took her survey, was appalled by the gender choices: male or female. Appalled enough to spam the entire list of grad students with a paragraph on social justice and acceptance.

That was a poor choice. Even poorer decision making was displayed by the 20 other people that then continued the discussion CCing ALL the grad student list-servs. The discussion expanded somewhat and the most recent email contained not just statements on social justice, but on manners, the phylogeny of the mango tree and the racial classifications on the US Census.

We've passed 40 emails and they still trickling in.... seriously people, don't you have something BETTER to do? Like, write your thesis?

Another fun fact...

Once upon a time in France, children born with cretinism were thought to be so mentally retarded that they were incapable of sinning. Thus the name cretinism, meaning Christlike.

Cretinism, for those not studying for the USMLEs, is endemic fetal hypothyroidism.

WTF?

I was looking up information on intelligence tests (they constitute testable material on USMLE step 1) and I found a page about high IQ societies and their entrance requirements. Apparently many of them will accept high scores on the GRE or the LSAT, but not the MCAT. I'm not nearly as surprised that the GMAT doesn't count...

High IQ societies

You know you're a med student when...

You realise you washed suture with your white coat.

AND you're excited it's still in tact so you can practice.

Words medical school taught me to spell:

abscess
arrhythmia
component
dilated
epididymis
etiology
exercise
fourchette
gynecomastia
immunoflorescence
staphylococcus
wenckebach

Acute hepatic congestion or nutmeg?

Liver or pumpkin pie?

Finally watching tv

Old woman to doc: Dr, When I arrived at the hospital I had one leg and now I have two!
Doc: Well, there is a war on, is it possible you miscounted?

-Dr. Who [episode 10 season 1]

A spirochete song

My professor sang this to us in lab. Then he played a CD of his son's band performing it. It was originally printed in JAMA on Jan 31, 1942. Can you guess the disease?

There was a young man of Black Bay
Who thought syphilis just went away,
  And felt that a chancre
  Was merely a canker
Acquired in lascivious play.

Now first he got acne vulgaris,
The kind that is rampant in Paris,
  It covered his skin
  From forehead to shin,
And now people ask where his hair is.

With symptoms increasing in number,
His aorta's in need of a plumber,
  His heart is cavorting,
  His wife is aborting,
And now he's acquired a gumma.

Consider his terrible plight--
His eyes won't react to to the light
  His hands are apraxic,
  His gait is ataxic,
He's developing gun-barrel sight.

His passions are strong, as before,
But his penis is flaccid, and sore,
  His wife now has tabes
  And sabre-shinned babies--
She's really worse off than a whore.

He aches from his head to his toes,
His sphincters have gone where who knows,
  Paroxysmal incontinence
  With all its concomitants,
Brings forth unpredictable flows.

Though treated in every known way,
His spirochetes grow day by day,
  He's developed paresis
  Converses with Jesus
And thinks he's the Queen of the May.

It's syphilis.

I'm going home with the DJ...

Because she's my roommate...

<---

Remixed: No Handlebars

[to the tune of Handlebars by the Flobots]

I do dissections with my Netters guide
My Netters guide
My Netters guide

Look at me, look at me
Hands in a guy who's so sad to be
DECEASED
And I'm an M1 student
Though my stethoscope's brand new you'll see
I can hear your heart go boom ba-boom
I can show you how to take blood pressure
I can take a full patient history
And I an almost tell you what it means
I watch all the lectures at double speed
And I take all my quizzes in the LRC
I know all the types of cell necrosis
And I'm proud to be at Michigan
Me and my friend saw a surgery
Me and my friend can place an IV
And guess how much we sleep
I can treat anything you got cuz, see

I can hear a murmur with no stethoscope
No stethoscope
No stethoscope

I see your MI on the EKG
on the EKG
on the EKG

Look at me, look at me
Cuz I'm on call but I'd rather be
ASLEEP
In such a warm bed
Tired out with dictation to do
I won't make money in my residency
And I won't see my significant other
I'll be almost forty before I'm debt free
Almost a quarter million dollars
I will proscribe antibiotics
I will make your body function without your heart or lungs
I know how to check a reflex
And I can make you stick out your tongue, say ah
Doctors, surgeons and the patients
We all find insurance so frustrating
I see the slowing on your EEG
But no epileptiform activity

I can hear your problems but I'll never tell
But I'll never tell
But I'll never tell

I can thin your blood with IV heparin
IV heparin
IV heparin

Look at me, look at me
Learning and I won't stop
It feels so good to be an
MD, yeah a doc
My oath is global
My ethics secure
My profession noble
My job is to serve
I will hand out a million vaccinations
And give all my patients good explanations
And sew up so many lacerations
Perform post-surgical extubations
I can write a complete review of systems
Including your vital signs and
All of your medications in a list when
You get discharged and it's time to go

I can see your brain on the MRI
the MRI
the MRI

And I can stop the seizures with some Topamax
With some Topamax
With some Topamax

And I can fix blue babies with a full Fontan
With a full Fontan
With a full Fontan

I really do!

Why so popular?

It mystifies me that the hands-down most often keyword-searched page on my blog is this post from July 26, 2006. It is far and away the most frequently visited page of my blog.

It turns out that if you google the words "screwdriver" and "chest," my blog comes up first. Cool.

Choosing a School

I am sitting in the law library (view from my chair, right) working on my biochemistry term paper on dentatorubral-pallidoluysian atrophy (DRPLA), but my mind keeps wandering. I have now heard from all my medical schools and must begin choosing where I want to spend the next four years. I have narrowed it down to three at which I have been accepted: Michigan, Mt. Sinai or UPitt or two at which I have been waitlisted: WashU or UPenn.

I am content to live in any of the above cities and they will all cost me about the same amount of money, so how do I choose? I am so paralysed by the decision that I have actually asked several of the attendings I know at the hospital to rank them for me (which they did: Upenn got 3 votes and WashU got 1 for the top spot).

I think what makes it so difficult is that I would be happy at any of these schools. All of them set me up well for the future; there is no wrong choice. I am extremely fortunate to be in this position and I recognize that. But I still have to choose. And I am still stuck.

In the meantime, this paper still needs to be written. Back to biochem.

Yummy!

We were talking about oatmeal chocolate chip cookies all day so when I got home I just had to make some. I didn't have any brown sugar so I used white sugar and maple syrup instead (and added a little extra flour) - they came out very moist and chewy... yum!

Bill Gates never took chemistry

Microsoft Word spell check suggestion for a-l-d-e-h-y-d-e: b-a-l-d-h-e-a-d-e-d.