Navel-gazing
signout | April 26, 2007Lately, I seem to be having a bit of the writer's block. Yes, I'm still working, and yes, crazy things continue to happen on the job. It just feels as though it's been a while since I had a meaningful reaction to a patient or colleague interaction. I'm a little tired of feeling other people's pain.
As I often do when I'm not sure whether my findings are within the expected range, I did a literature search. It turns out my impending nervous breakdown is going to happen right on schedule--maybe even a little late. This study published in 2002 found that sixty-one otherwise well-adjusted…
signout | April 5, 2007My fellow Scibling (cute, huh?) Bora is an incredibly friendly, warm, and funny blogger. He's also incredibly proficient: in addition to blogging at A Blog around the Clock, he's put together an anthology of science blogging, and a freaking conference of science bloggers. The man has the energy of a toddler on crank.
Bora just tagged me with the "Why Do I Blog?" meme, wherein I am meant to tell my volumes of readers why I blog.
That's easy:
1) I love to write.
2) I love to be read.
As far back as I can remember, I wanted to be a writer. I never pursued writing seriously because my folks…
signout | April 2, 2007Not half an hour ago, post-call after an exhausting night in our cardiac care unit, I stopped in at the residency program office to pick up my mail. At the top of the stack was an envelope with a familiar name in the return address--the name of a man I had taken care of while on a general medicine rotation a few weeks ago. Inside was my first thank-you note from a patient, written in a tender, newsy tone by an old man whose diagnosis I can't for the life of me remember.
It comes at a strange time. After my short time on the cardiac care service, I have become more dubious than ever before…
signout | February 16, 2007I love this*:
To the left, next to "Paediatrics," I'd add, "Hates adults and children and self" > "Med-Peds."
*Courtesy of the British Medical Journal.
signout | January 17, 2007For those of you new to Signout, I'm a first-year resident (i.e., an intern) in a medical residency program in the United States.
Medical education is different all over the world. In the U.S., we spend four years getting a bachelor's degree (which doesn't need to be science-related); four years getting a medical degree (in which we take a standardized group of courses in medically related sciences and clinical medicine); anywhere from three to seven years training as a resident (all clinical, all the time, and standardized according to the requirements of the field in which the training is…
signout | January 17, 2007Further proving the existence of God (just kidding! Hi, neighbors!), I am now writing under the ScienceBlogs umbrella. This is terribly exciting for me, and I look forward to being part of this formidable community of thinkers and writers.
To those new to Signout: Hello. Welcome. Have a cookie, or maybe a nice piece fruit. Thanks for visiting. The archives are coming.
To those new to ScienceBlogs: Hello. Welcome. Thanks for following me here, where I plan to keep doing whatever it is that I do. Please, check out my amazing neighbors.
Yes, you may also have a cookie.
terrasig | December 15, 2006I specifically launched Terra Sigillata on my sister's birthday last year so that my aging brain wouldn't have to remember (or forget) yet another important date.
The original post and ad hoc mission statement holds up pretty well after a year. I've also moved my second post, "Why Terra Sigillata?," over here so that folks can appreciate why a name most commonly encountered by ceramics craftspersons is a perfect metaphor for medicines from the Earth.
For those who don't know my background or never read the About section, I'm a displaced pharmacy and pharmacology professor working in an odd…
signout | October 19, 2006It is 1 a.m. on a Thursday night, and the only light in my apartment is coming from the laptop that sits in front of me in my bed. In four hours, I'll begin my third day of a monthlong rotation through the neonatal intensive care unit (the NICU). I normally do not have trouble with sleep, but every night since starting this rotation, I've laid in bed awake for hours, my thoughts coming fast and strange. Although I eventually sleep, I wake up in the middle of the night unable to rest for hours at a time. The only dreams I can remember are about being lonely and scared.
I'm not sure why this…
terrasig | September 24, 2006I completely missed it: a rather momentous occasion in the life of this blog.
The ScienceBlogs.com version of Terra Sigillata just passed the traffic volume of the old site on Wednesday, 20 Sept at 9:14 pm EDT with a visitor from Arlington, MA, USA.
Visitor 13,986 must be a regular reader because they came directly here, not even through the ScienceBlogs frontpage from which I derive almost 20% of my traffic.
So, while it took just over nine months to reach almost 14,000 visitors at the old blog (although I haven't had a new post there since June), we got to 14,000 here in the new digs in…
signout | September 16, 2006"Is someone down?" asked T., who was driving. We were on our way back from an intern retreat day in the mountains, and while stopped at a traffic light, we had noticed a cluster of people standing in the oncoming lane of traffic. Looking out my door into the dark, I could make out three people looking down at a black umbrella. Under the umbrella was a body. "Yeah," I said, "someone's down."
I got out of the car, crossed the street, and ran toward the umbrella. S. was close behind me, and T. got out of the car and followed him. A young woman was lying down on the ground with her legs bent at…
terrasig | September 4, 2006"Labor Day differs in every essential way from the other holidays of the year in any country," said Samuel Gompers, founder and longtime president of the American Federation of Labor. "All other holidays are in a more or less degree connected with conflicts and battles of man's prowess over man, of strife and discord for greed and power, of glories achieved by one nation over another. Labor Day...is devoted to no man, living or dead, to no sect, race, or nation."
Put simply, the struggles of the American labor movement have given me the luxury of being a scientist, having such a thing as "…
terrasig | August 26, 2006Four years ago at 11:24 am EDT (1624 GMT), your humble blogger was handed the keys to a whole new vocabulary of love.
The gift came in the form of a 7 lb. 13 oz. (3,544 gm), 20.5 inch (52 cm) bundle of drooling, peeing, meconium-pooping bundle of baby girl, yanked from an incision in PharmGirl's abdomen.
The lessons of compassion and unconditional love I have been taught by these two women have comprised the most formative experiences of my life.
In return, PharmGirl has suffered tremendous indignancies on my behalf: the necessary biological machinations required to mix haploid DNA…
signout | August 16, 2006I have heard through the grapevine that certain people are not so interested in reading what I write here because it is, and I quote, "too sad."
It's never occurred to me that my job is especially sad. Yes, I'm surrounded by sick people, and yes, most cheese danish to be found in our hospital is abysmal. But by this point, most of my colleagues and I have created so much distance between ourselves and our patients that it takes a lot to really make us feel sad about our work. Plus, we can always bring in danish from outside the hospital.
With the exception of the occasional paperwork…
terrasig | August 3, 2006Thanks to all for coming over and sharing your MTV memories earlier this week. Our SciBling editor and cat-herder, Katherine, came across with a very vivid list of great memories and Orac was able to bitch about being ever so slightly older than me. Then, Karmen surprised me by intimating that cable TV actually existed in Colorado in 1981, at least at her Grandma's house.
I said I was going to tell you some of my general recollections of MTV, but I have very specific memories of this very week 25 years ago thanks to my personal archivist, number one fan, and all-around keeper of my life…
terrasig | July 30, 2006If posting frequency is any indication, regular readers might be able to tell that the last two or three weeks have not been the highlight of my life. And, thankfully for you, I've kept much of it off-blog because of the unique personal identifying characteristics than prevent me from being too honest here. But, let it suffice to say that several friends of mine and old lab colleagues have had deaths of family members due to cancer, two of which were at painfully young ages...not that there's any 'good' time to die of cancer.
Is this odd? Do my recent experiences represent a statistical…
terrasig | July 19, 2006This is growing tiresome and painful.
I have a wonderful physician-scientist research collaborator who, God bless her (or your own personal God-equivalent), takes care of little people with cancer. You'd think that a person who chooses this line of work would get a frickin' karmic break, right?
I just learned that her brother died last week of brain cancer; I believe it was glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), not a good one, if there is such a thing. He is survived by his wife and 4-year-old daughter. I learned from her of his diagnosis at a cancer research meeting last November - what's that…
terrasig | July 9, 2006I wasn't going to disclose my location while on working vacation, but since half the world already has my dang cell phone number, I might as well share with you the latest from Aspen, a magnificent mountain town whose winter opulence gives way to slightly less opulence in the summer, together with some great art, music, science, and discussions of great ideas. Apologies to my SciBlings Karmen and Kevin for having such a short jaunt through the Front Range and being unable to catch up in person this time. Sounded like Kevin was checking out for awhile himself.
Got in late last night and had…
terrasig | July 5, 2006I've gotten a bit sidetracked so we'll have to wait on my follow-up on pharmacist's refusal and some posts I've been working on about curcumin in cancer and the concerns about lay persons making treatment recommendations about lymphoma treatment.
I just learned over the weekend that the brother of one of my best former student lab interns died during a battle with osteosarcoma. He was a 23-year-old athlete who, after a bike wreck and several surgeries, still decided to run a midwestern marathon last fall. After the race, he felt unusual femoral pain that turned out osteosarcoma. He had…
terrasig | June 25, 2006Blogging has been very light over the last two weeks as I was serving my national health agency and fellow scientists and physicians by critically evaluating research proposals. By the end of last week, the sight of my computer screen began to induce migraines and I'm still not feeling 100%.
However, my cross-town blog bud and SiBling, Coturnix, has tagged me with the 4 Meme to get me warmed back up for writing of a different sort. After I finish this, I'll see about answering the last two questions from 'Ask a ScienceBlogger.'
4 jobs you've had:
1. Dishwasher at an Italian restaurant
2.…
signout | June 23, 2006Today was my first day of residency. In the large, academic medical center where I work, the wards were filled with people like me: kids fresh out of medical school, creases still not washed out of our long white coats, playing with the buttons on our beepers, looking for the bathrooms. For the next year, we will be the interns, and on this first day, we tried to like it. It wasn't that hard, right? There was a free lunch, and the nurses were really nice to us. Plus, now we have real responsibility. We love responsibility.
It gets easier to be an intern with every year that passes. A few…