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Last year, our very own Janet Stemwedel (of Adventures in Ethics and Science) introduced ScienceBlogs to DonorsChoose. Put simply, this organization matches a donor's funds with a grade school classroom project that donor wishes to fund. This means that if, like me, you go on and on about the sorry…
One of my neighbors at Scienceblogs, Retrospectacle's Shelley Batts, has been nominated for a blogging scholarship--meaning, an award toward study given to a blogger of note.
The scholarship award recipient is determined by votes, and Shelley is in second place. In my estimation, she has a fine…
Whoops. Signout is so severely mellowed out that she scheduled her vacation posts all wrong. Oh well--just means fewer krazy kommenters to "huh?" at on her return.
As reparation, she submits this sweet memory of cluelessness from the archives, then hastily returns to picking sand out from between…
As recompense for the daily slog that is residency, Signout is going away for a much-needed week or so at the beach. She promises that when she returns in mid-October, she will be tanned, rested, and ready to resume taking everybody's shit. Meanwhile, please enjoy some of her greatest hits [in her…
In addition to containing the Truth, the Science Creative Quarterly (SCQ) contains a whole lot of really excellent science writing. Some of it is by ScienceBloggers, but much of it is not.
I recently heard of the site from a Signout reader named Benjamin Langer, who himself has a very nice critical…
There's a news article over at The Scientist on the life science blogs favored by the unwashed masses (i.e., you).
Go there, and make your scratchy little voices heard!
Many thanks to Zuska for the tip.
I can think of at least 20 regular readers who need to look at Carl Zimmer's collection of science tattoos immediately.
Some of them are lyrical, detailed, and beautiful. Others are tight, terse, and smart. Still others consist of carefully considered text. All are clearly quite meaningful to their…
There's sad news from the HIV prevention front: trials of an experimental vaccine against HIV have been suspended in the wake of an interim data analysis suggesting it's not really effective.
Per the NIH's press release, the vaccine hasn't been shown to alter either the predisposition to or course…
In the resident room at our hospital, we have a dry-erase board that plays an important role in resident education. On one side of the board, residents write the emergency department's (ED's) diagnoses of patients admitted to the medicine service. On the other side of the board, they write the…
Next to my unfettered access to the ScienceBlogs Ski-Doo, my favorite SB perk is the weekly newsletter. Now you can live the sweet life, too, by signing up for the "Week in ScienceBlogs" email. It's first class all the way, baby!
The newsletter is great for picking up on the highlights of the week…
Much as activism kind of annoys me--I blame my polite mother--I am fairly solidly behind the woman who's fighting facebook for banning pictures of her breastfeeding. Breastfeeding is really good for babies,* and I'm all for making it as easy for moms to do as possible. That might mean overcoming…
Over the weekend, I got an email from Thomas over at Hope for Pandora. Thomas blogs about science and society from a lefty point of view. Now that he's about to start in on clinical medicine, he's hoping to blog about his patient experiences, too.
Not without reason, he is fraught with panic (OK,…
I spent the afternoon today in the office of Dr. Leaky, a neurologist who takes care of people with movement disorders. One of the patients we saw was a man in his late fifties with amytrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, otherwise known as Lou Gehrig's disease). ALS is a devastating illness that slowly…
Seen taped to the cover of a large emergency medicine text:
Sick --> admit to medicine or surgery
Not sick --> Vicodin, generic discharge paperwork
Not sure --> admit to neurology
See, this kind of shit makes me crazy.
There's a press release floating around about another study that demonstrates that women and men are, well, you know. The way they are.
It should be noted that this report will appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (appropriately, PNAS…
How could I have been such a fool?
It's been two months since I started feeling empty at work. It started with anger toward some bad systems at my institution. Lately, I've started feeling some resentment toward colleagues who ask for help--a bad sign--and even occasional resentment toward patients…
A friend of mine who finished her residency in June just took a job in a non-medical field. I talked to her over the phone last weekend. She is so happy in her new position, she said, so happy.
Sure, I said, who wouldn't love a 9-to-5 job after what you've just finished?
You know, it's not even…
For those of you who check regularly for updates, my apologies. I have been far too angry with absolutely everything about my shitty, shitty job to write anything but screed for the past couple of weeks. And no one comes here to read screed.
Please hold while I attempt to develop a new coping…
I was in the olive department at the local market a few weeks ago, when I heard a voice from in front of the Cerignolas. "Dr. Signout? Is that you?"
At one look, I knew who it was--the father of a girl whose forehead I'd sewn up months ago, near the middle of my intern year. I smiled, made chat,…
Running a resident team on the general medicine wards is not a simple thing, especially at this time of year. The medical students are new to clinical work, and are painfully self-conscious. The interns are new to the hospital, and are scared of their own shadows. The upper-level residents are new…
As part of my efforts to multitask, I read while I work out. It works well for me: if the reading material is interesting, I hardly even notice I'm schvitzing while reading. An unfortunate consequence of this habit is its magnification of my tendency to talk to my reading material, as when I yelled…
P.S. I love Highly Trained Monkey, and consider myself extremely remiss for not posting the link to the latest Change of Shift at her blog. Enjoy!
We're not supposed to pick favorites among our patients, but I have one. We'll call her Brenda.
Brenda heard about our clinic through a friend of hers, a guy she used to smoke crack with. She'd been off drugs and booze for almost a year when she came to see me. Now that she was sober, she said, she…
I stayed in the hospital late last night to finish some paperwork. As I was nearing the end of the pile, the code bells went off. I didn't have to, but I ran, anyway, and when I got to the room, I was the first one there.
I took a deep breath. "I'm with internal medicine. How can I help?"
I'm an…
It's unbelievable, the company I somehow manage to keep in this blog neighborhood: Rob Knop of Galactic Interactions is one of the cosmologists today awarded a portion of this year's Gruber Prize in Cosmology.
Since pretty much the second he hung out his ScienceBlogs shingle, Rob has regularly been…
For those of you craving more more more on the origins, hangups, and favored afternoon activities of the Signout, hie thee over here. Although the ScienceBlogs interviewers call me elusive, I insist that I really am slow-moving, easy to spot, and marvelously accessible, as demonstrated by the…
About a year ago, when I was an intern in the throes of my first medicine ward rotations, I got a compliment that shone in my memory for weeks.
We had a rather complicated patient on our team. Her case was such that she often required several family meetings a day, and because I was busy with…
Every now and then, I get email from young aspiring physicians who wish to drink from my fount of wisdom with respect to Choosing a Life Direction. I find this hilarious, seeing as my path to where I am now has been of the relatively winding variety, and that even on the best of days, I still see…
I've started my second year of residency with a rotation where I don't really function that differently from an intern. Our job descriptions are almost exactly the same: arrive stupid early, gather data on several sick people, round with our moody attending, and run around following up on details…
I have a secret crush on one of my patients, an 85-year old man who's recovering from a bad pneumonia. After a weeklong stay in the intensive care unit, he has recovered at a remarkable pace: the day after he was extubated, he was out of bed with a physical therapist, making his way slowly around…