Studying with kittens...

...is a lost cause. But, it must be done! I don't feel like going to Borders today, so I'm going to study at home. After this post, though, I'm going to the living room and not touching the computer again for at least 6 hours. Whether I can keep my attention away from Moxie and Mojo, however, is another story. Speaking of which, here they are!

Moxie (L) and Mojo (R)

Moxie, nearly falling asleep perched on the couch...

...and after she did fall asleep on my leg.

Here's Mojo. He's going to be hard to photograph since he's black, just like my old cat, Marble. (He's not a regular tuxedo -- he has white hair interspersed all over, as though he's gone prematurely white, like my brother.) Plus, he's a spaz, so he won't hold still for me to try. All I can get are blurry images of something black whizzing by, or else I happen to catch his bright blue eyes in reflection.

I just have to make it through the week, though, and then I'll have plenty of time to learn black-cat-photography. Wish me luck! I need to become a genius in respiration, renal function, biochemistry (purines/pyrimidines, molecular bio, and making/breaking/using glucose), and all of neurosciences (it's the final, yikes!)...

Oh, before I forget, my seedlings have also sprouted! I have a whole bunch of them, oregano, mint, cilantro, thyme, etc, in a window box. Herbs are too expensive, so I've decided to try growing my own. Right now they're only a centimeter tall, though, so it will be a while before I can start cooking! I'm also growing catnip and grass in pots for the kitties, but those haven't sprouted at all yet.

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And, I would like to announce that I will no longer be answering the questions, "So, how is medical school?""Do you think it's worth it?" and other such variations. It's not fair to ask a first-year student that. A dad struck up a conversation with me at Borders the other day when he saw my med school sweatshirt. His daughter is contemplating medical school. Honestly, I really want to tell people it's not worth it, the state of medicine sucks, and will for my entire career, and medical school itself is an awful bore and chore, memorizing stuff just so I can forget it again. I can barely tell my own sister it's worth it. But, instead, I suck it up and answer with a smile, "Well, I've been told that the end of the tunnel is there, even though I can't see it yet!" Ha ha. And with that, it's back to studying.

Spring break, week 2

My older-younger sister, Laurel, is visiting us this week for her spring break. I'm not getting the amount of work done that I need to, but oh well... a mental spring break isn't so bad, right? Except this is my last week before my next round of tests :( She leaves tomorrow night, so then I can catch up...

While she is here, we're eating lots of yummy food. Yesterday we tried Gumbo A Go-Go, and had really good jambalya, gumbo, and crawfish etoufee. We also tried the drunken chicken which was good, just not a good fit for me, personally.

Today Laurel came to school with me and sat through an hour of boring lecture, then we got a snack at Long John Silver's so I could try their new lobster bites. Verdict: they're OK, but you really shouldn't be breading and frying lobster. It becomes too chewy. Stick with fried fish, and you'll be fine. Then we walked around Baer Fabrics and Joe Ley's antiques. I love browsing in Baer's even when I don't have any sewing projects, and Joe Ley's was really crazy. It's got 3 floors of all sorts of antiques, from furniture to knick-knacks to house parts (hinges, door knobs, table legs, etc). Tonight we're going to dinner at Los Aztecas (thanks to restaurant.com), which I've heard is good. For lunch tomorrow, I think we're going to go to Saffron Buffet, which is Persian food. Yum yum!

In other news, ESC and I found kittens to adopt on Monday. They're 7 weeks old, a girl brown tabby and a boy black kitten. They both have longish hair; we'll see how long it gets when they're grown up. I've never had a long-haired cat before, but they're supposed to shed less, which is good, although they need brushing more. We're trying to think of names right now -- suggestions are appreciated. We'll get to take them home next week, after they get their second round of shots and get fixed (isn't 8 weeks young to be fixed?). I can't wait!

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Update: Long John Silver's lobster bites are made of langostino lobster, which is actually a type of crawfish. It does taste more like lobster than crawfish, so that must be where they get away with it. A quick Google search found that a California eatery got sued for marketing "lobster burritos" that were actually langostino lobster. So Long John Silver acknowledges the fact that they are langostino lobster (it's even in large print, not fine), but I guess they're banking on the fact that most people don't know what a langostino lobster is and are just focusing on the word "lobster." Damn marketing people. Anyway, the lobster bites are OK, but deep frying them makes them too chewy. Steamed, like real lobster, I bet they'd actually be pretty good, even if they are the size of a popcorn shrimp.

"Hi"s and "Lo"s

Because we used to do these in our RA staff meetings and I miss them...

Hi's
1) Discovering Cash Cab, on Discovery. Possibly the best game show next to Jeopardy. How fun would it be to get into a cab and win over $1000?!
2) The KONG, a great dog toy. I bought a large red one for Duchess and a king-sized Xtreme black one for Dozer today. They're great and bouncy, durable for chewing, and I stuffed a dog treat inside each one to provide hours of work for the dogs. A great invention.
3) Seeing Paula and Marjorie this past weekend. I have so much fun talking to them, we don't even have to go out and do anything to have fun.
4) Having no agenda for the week (I choose to ignore the biochemistry and physiology sitting in front of me)

Lo's
1) Pet hair. It's everywhere in this house. I washed all the bed coverings on my bed as soon as I got home, but the dogs like to come in and sleep all over the bed every day -- even on the pillows! -- so it's already made its reappearance.
2) Cat pee. We have a rescued cat, Hassle, whom my sister found as a bag of bones a little over a year ago. He was so starved and traumatized that he ate his own poop for a long time. Now he's plumped up and acts like a normal cat, but he still pees inside occasionally, I think just out of spite. Thankfully, most of the house has wood or tile flooring, but there's an Oriental rug in the living room that I've now had to steam clean twice. Thankfully, we also have a steam cleaner vacuum, but it still doesn't get rid of all of the cat pee and I can smell it whenever I'm in the living room. Ick.
3) Spring break is more than halfway over :(
4) I still haven't done that biochemistry or physiology...

Spring Break

I'm home for spring break, and it feels nice to not be in school. Saturday night I stayed in Baltimore and hung out with my best friends Paula and Marjorie. Paula is a 3rd-year at University of Maryland so she lives in Baltimore, and Marjorie, who is a 2nd-year at Drexel, was down for the weekend for the Medical Students for Choice conference. That aspect made for some interesting, um, conversation, with two Catholic seminary students sitting next to us at the bar Saturday night. The one guy was trying to be nice, he said he understood why it was a difficult issue, that women who are raped, etc, need to have choices. His friend just wanted to get into a philosophical discussion about why abortion can be justified but not war, and all sorts of other craziness we didn't want to discuss at a bar. Paula was sitting there uncomfortably and Marjorie was enjoying the fight, but I managed to excuse ourselves politely and wish them well in their future careers. I could never become a priest (not that they would let me!), but I have to admire those guys for doing it. Very noble, and they are going to find themselves dealing with their own sticky moral issues that I hope they can handle.

Sunday my mom and sister Laurel and I drove to Monticello, home of Thomas Jefferson. It was about a 3-hour drive, so I did a lot of driving that day. Monday I drove Laurel back up to College Park and browsed around IKEA for a little bit and then cleaned the house. Well, I attempted to clean it. With two dogs who like to shed and destroy things, it's rather difficult.

Yesterday I took the dogs out for an hour romp in the woods and then played with them in the backyard and finished reading Mirror Mirror, the Gregory Maguire book I got for Christmas. If you haven't read any of his stuff, I highly recommend it. Wicked was great (it was made into a musical, for goodness sakes!) and I've also read Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. Maguire has a really interesting writing style -- it's actually a little flowery and convoluted for me, but the plot keeps me going. With the Snow White and Cinderella stories, he did a good job of telling the stories in historically and culturally believable settings, which make them less like fairy tales and more like human tales. He also does a good job of telling stories from a different point of view, not necessarily the heroine's. I highly recommend them.

Today I ran a couple errands, including getting my eyebrows waxed, which I haven't done in an embarrasingly long time. I took the dogs out on another walk, this time to some undeveloped land in our development, and Duchess, our 4-year-old beagle, went nuts digging for something underground. She never did find it, but she dug up a good-sized tract of land. Dozer, our gigantic 1-year-old shepherd mutt, joined her in digging, but only to be a copycat -- or dog. He's actually really funny, because he's totally dependent on others. He won't go to the bathroom outside unless Duchess is out there with him; this morning he wanted to nap, but he kept following me from room to room so he wouldn't be napping alone. However, he's also got the shepherding instinct, so that when the two of them go on walks, Dozer will take Duchess's leash in his mouth so he can walk her. Ridiculous dogs, both of them. My parents are building a fence in the backyard so they can go out without being tethered and get some real exercise when no one's around. That will be nice, because right now they are fat, lazy dogs who satisfy their energy requirements by destroying the house.

Anyway, it's nice to be home and not have a real agenda, although I do need to do some studying. I get home Saturday night, and my sister Laurel is going to come visit next week while she's on her break, so I need to get some studying out of the way now, before my next round of tests on the 31st. But the TV and couch are so comfy, I might take just a small nap instead...

Comfort Food!

For some, it means chicken and dumplings or fried chicken, or gumbo. For me, it means a nice, hot bowl of noodles. I went to Oriental House for dinner tonight, and I was in heaven! I've driven past it before, and it looked like your average take-out Chinese place, albeit a little more "authentically" (if we lived in the 1800s) decorated. However, I noticed a review on LouisvilleHotBytes indicating they had an authentic Chinese menu, so I went over there for dinner tonight. The authentic menu is great -- mostly HK style dishes, including braised beef noodle soup, which was what I had. I wanted to try so many things, but I was by myself, and I've stopped trying to embarrass myself in public by eating a lot. The table next to me got a roast duck and plate of gai lan, and it looked soooo good. The people who run the place are very nice as well, and trying to really build up a following for their authentic menu. The soup was as good as Sang Kee's in Philly, and we all know how much I like Sang Kee. My only complaint is that they didn't have wonton noodle soup -- only beef, roast pork, and duck -- the meatier broths, rather than the lighter ones. Oh well. It's still really good and I can't wait to go back -- with people! I had to really exercise self-control to not order three more dishes to go :)

My future as a doctor

What only a few people have ever mentioned to me is how difficult it is to be a physician in your own family. I've heard the stories of people asking for medical advice at cocktail parties or whatever, and I've heard from a couple of people that they do not diagnose family members' illnesses (obviously, you're not supposed to definitively treat your family; the chance to be biased against their normal amounts of complaining are very high), but I never really thought about what would happen when it happened to me. Well, now I'm in the middle of it.

My grandmother in Hong Kong had a stroke yesterday, and my cousin who is there and is becoming the primary contact point for everything has been trying to keep me up to speed via email. I know a fair amount about diagnosing and localizing brain events, since that's what I'm studying right now, but that sort of information isn't going to do anything except satisfy my curiosity. For instance, she is having trouble speaking, and I'm trying to figure out if it's dysarthria or aphasia, and if it's the latter, what kind. Are her cranial nerves intact? How is her memory? But clinically, these things don't change the picture. If she's had a stroke, she's had a stroke, and now we need to figure out what to do. I want my mom to go over there, and I want to go as well (but I probably can't), and take charge. Someone with some sense needs to be in charge of this situation, not a 22-year-old kid (he means well and cares, I know) with no medical knowledge (he's in banking/finance) or common sense in this area. But, those things will work themselves out, since they're pressing and everyone's trying to figure them out. What has really gotten to me is the sudden onslaught of advice about ridiculous things. I think my cousin is Googling to find out about stroke treatment, etc., and sending me articles to read for my opinion.

For example: http://www.democratandchronicle.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?aid=/20060303/opinion02/603030369/1039/opinion

This is, clearly, an opinion piece published last week in the Rochester (NY) Democrat and Chronicle, written by neurologists in Rochester in response to something published in February touting the benefit of acupuncture for stroke treatment and rehabilitation. The neurologists point out that the only proven therapy for stroke is t-PA ("clot-busters"), and further research needs to be conducted on other therapies before they can be recommended for use. They do not discount acupuncture, but they caution against trusting things before they have been tested. I CANNOT OFFER ANY FURTHER INFORMATION REGARDING THIS MATTER WITHOUT DOING EXTENSIVE RESEARCH MYSELF, WHICH I DO NOT HAVE THE TIME FOR. All I can say, and I have, is that acupuncture has not been proven for this, but it may be beneficial. I would suggest finding an acupuncturist experienced in stroke therapy, of which I'm sure there are plenty in Hong Kong (note: I believe acupuncture is therapeutic for a wide variety of illnesses; I just don't know anything about its use in stroke therapy).

Now, before you get all mad at me, I KNOW my family is turning to me because they see me as the closest thing they have to an expert. I KNOW it is a way for them to relieve their stress and seek comfort. But getting all of this off of my chest in this forum is how I am going to releve MY stress, so feel free to stop reading at any time.

The best thing for everyone to do right now is listen to what my grandmother's doctors are saying (I question the quality of the healthcare she is receiving, but nothing can be done about that now) and ask for my input, which I'm happy to provide, as well as everyone else's, when decisions need to be made. But there is no sense in digging around on the Internet for obscure treatments that claim to be able to cure her or that have not been tested rigorously, such as the WARP-10. Contrary to popular opinion, just because something won't help does NOT mean that it will not harm!

I have no idea how this particular situation is going to turn out, and I hope my grandmother will be OK, but it has become very clear to me that I am going to be put in situations like this for many years to come. Patients, I can handle. Family, I'm not so sure.

It's cozy in here...

btw, Pearls Before Swine is the best comic strip in the entire universe.

Grown-up shoes

I have a problem with shoes. I love them, but I always fall for the same thing -- heeled sandals. This is great for summer and for times when I'm not walking, but it's now winter and I walk to school. For a while now, I've needed something classy, dressy, but low-heeled -- and I found them at Ann Taylor last weekend! I love them already -- a little bit of a pointed toe, a little bit of a heel, and a cute little bow at the front. I feel like I'm actually 25 years old when I wear them -- what a concept! I'll still be happier when it gets warm and I can go back to wearing strappy sandals, though.

Now if I could only lose those 10 pounds and find a great dress to wear to Paige's wedding...

March is teasing me

Yesterday was 72 degrees and sunny. After coming back from Frankfort, where we lobbied state legislators to support single-payer healthcare ("You mean SOCIALIZED healthcare? I have a son, daughter, and son-in-law who are all doctors, and they would not support this. I'm quite frankly surprised that YOU, as future doctors, would support this. I think we'd better end this conversation now, because I am just not going to agree with you." --Representative Draud, (R), Edgewood), I drove around town with the top down and sprawled out at Waterfront Park to do some reading. Today, it's 57 degrees; not quite warm enough to sit outside, but warm enough that I don't feel like working. Tomorrow's high: 46. Come back, spring!

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Since I'm supposed to be studying neuro today, I'll leave you with a neuro fun fact of the day: Pain is a very complex sensation, mediated by a variety of different nerve fiber types and running throughout your brain. It is difficult to treat, but also difficult to measure. Here is one example of a pain scale, on which the average pain of various events has been plotted:

The take-home message of this chart is that labor without anesthesia is second only to amputation of a digit in terms of pain. (The only thing worse than amputation of a digit is causalgia, a sustained burning type of pain related to traumatic injury of a nerve.) That is why drugs are good.