Second Best

For those of you who know me, you know that I believe very strongly in my religion. That's why this post is called second best. Because if had to choose a back-up, this would be it. The Jedi Church. It's for real. The Jedi Church was officially estabilished in this, the year of our Lord 2008. It's no secret that they've been around for years - putting down "Jedi" as their religion on census bureau data for quite a while. But what's different now is that is officially recognized by the UK as a religion. Ned Flanders admitted in one episode of the Simpsons to "eating Kosher - just in case." Well, here's to the Force - just in case.

A quick survey of their site reveals that they "have no doctrine", and that their members are almost exclusively males between the age of 10 and 40 who live in the US and UK. Most are students, although quite a few work for the government. Which reveals a rather bleak future for the religion. How far could a religion go without women? Then again there's always this girl:



I guess it's like the Smurfs. They only needed one Smurfette to populate an entire village of mushrooms.

Hijack a Phone Number

Yesterday my wife called me. Instead of hearing her familiar sweet voice, I was greeted by Optimus Prime. He told me that the Decepticons are waging war in my own home state and that I was needed in the battle lines. He also warned me that one of my classmates may have joined the enemy as a Decepticon named Devastator. He then instructed me that I could help by purchasing the Transformers movie on DVD or HD-DVD.

What is super awesome about this call is that you can send it to anyone from this website. I'm sure it's totally against the terms of agreement, but you could potentially hijack anyone's cell phone number and send anyone else a message. You could even send it to two people's phones at the same time (if you have two windows open) and have them call each other at the exact same time.

Poor Choice of Words

I like to read the weird news that comes across the AP wire. A great place to find it is at Yahoo's Oddly Enough. Tonight I noticed a rather poorly titled article ; "Cities Cracking Down on Sagging Pants". Very punny!

Life Lessons

So by popular demand*, or rather at least one person's demand, now at the end of my ER rotation I have more to blog about my actual ER rotation.

I'm sure everyone reading this has seen that awesomely cheesey poster that lists like a million things that you learn in kindergarten that make you a wonderful person. Well, this month in the ER I've compiled a similar list that will help make you a healthy person. At least as healthy as luck and/or stupidity will permit.

• Don't wear flip flops while mowing the lawn. Don't put your hand under a stalled lawn mower that is still turned on. Don't try to take a riding lawn mower out of the back of a pick-up truck all by yourself. All are really good ways to lose body parts. If you know the neumonic - it's usually a body part that you wouldn't use lidocaine with epinephrine on that you lose. If you don't know the neumonic, well, I'm not going to post it here because while I do like the attention from random google searches, that's not the attention I want.
• Don't cuss out homeless men with knives who ask you for money. They might stab you. A couple times.
• Don't zip your pants up too fast without looking to see what's still in the zipper. I didn't think that this actually happened, but as I discovered this month, it does. And it looks very painful.
• Don't lie to the doctor about what happened to you. For example, don't tell the doctors at 2 different hospitals that you fell off a swing if you actually were bitten by a cottonmouth snake. Some of them might believe you and your treatment might get delayed 6 hours and you might risk loosing body parts.
• Don't punch glass windows. Don't jump through glass windows. Don't lean all your body weight on glass windows. Don't push really hard on glass windows. Glass breaks. Broken glass is sharp. It will cut you. Deep. There will be blood. Lots of it.
• Don't insert objects PR. P stands for "per". R stands for a word that starts with R and sounds like "wrecked 'um". It might just disappear on you. And that's a really embarrassing story to have to tell the doctor.
• Don't think that you are too good for eye protection. Especially if you are breaking up concrete (it might just end up inside your eye) or working with methyl chlorobenzene (it might just burn your corneas right off).
• Don't think that vizine eye drops is all you need if you get methyl chlorobenzene in your eyes. And don't wait 2 days to go to the hospital.
• Don't do drugs. Especially fry (marijuana dipped in embalming fluid). It will make you crazy. Irreversible-forever-for-the-rest-of-your-life crazy.
• Don't think you no longer need your psychiatric anti-psychotic meds. You will go psychotic if you stop them.
• Don't think you don't need a seatbelt. Unless you are curious what it's like to break a steering wheel in half with your chest or go through the windshield.
• Don't put your feet over the passenger air bag. It will come out very fast and it will hurt you very badly.
• Don't accept unscreened blood transfusions from Mexico.
• Don't beat your child to death. The police are pretty good at figuring that one out.
• Don't let your kid ride a broken bicycle outside after 11 PM. It might just be asking for disaster.
• Don't come into an ER and ask for a pain medicine by name and dose. You won't get it, or much of anything else after that.
• Don't stop coumadin all of a sudden because you think it's not doing anything. If you had a stroke before and they put you on coumadin, it's pretty likely that you'll have another if you stop the coumadin.
• Don't get 20 tattoos and then be a cry baby about getting stitches. Or about getting shot by your father-in-law with a shotgun.
• Don't change your tire on a too-narrow shoulder of a busy 6 lane freeway. Unless you want to get hit by a car.
• Don't jaywalk and think you can beat any car. You can't. And cars weigh roughly 10 times what you do. And don't break as easily.
• Don't shoot at the police. They shoot back.
• Don't eat like an American.
• Don't think that you don't need pre-natal care. You do.
• Don't think that if the doctor told you to be on bedrest that this means don't go to work, but spend all day out and around town doing a million things.
• Don't bring all your personal belongings to the ER with you in a cardboard box. And then drop it all over the trauma bay as they are taking you out to a bed.
• Don't come to the ER and say you have a spider bite unless you saw an actual spider on you and saw and felt it actually bite you.
• Don't eat batteries.
• Don't come to the ER in a busy academic hospital unless you want some random medical student to anonymously blog about your stupidity.

So there you have it. Real convential wisdom for your bathroom wall.

*I say this is by popular demand, but I have no actual way of confirming this since apparently the popular demand all read this site previously via an RSS aggregator and never actually came and visited my site nor did they artificially inflate my self importance by raising my site visits counted by sitemeter.

Welcome 1st years!

Although I doubt a single one of them will read this, here's a big fat welcome to all the new first years who I saw today at orientation. They looked so innocent, naive, and excited to be there. We'll see about that once their first block of tests rolls around.

I had a good time sitting with my born-a-radiologist friend labeling the newbies as they walked by. Like the nerdy, quiet looking foriegners - aka "pathologists". Or the guys overflowing with testerone as the pretended not to be flexing for the bleach blond barbie dolls - aka "orthopedics". Or the bleach blond barbie dolls - aka "OB/Gyn". Or the totally lost and clueless guys wandering around - aka "Medicine". Or the super white, never seen the sun before - aka "radiologists". Or the hardcore shaved headed giant - aka "emergency". Or the not so nerdy or quiet looking foreigners - aka "family practice". Ok, I'll quit being so, um, specialty-ist there before I alienate everyone. (TS, notice there's not a single psych joke there - just making up for that aggie dig earlier!)

Anyway, it reminded me of how far we've come and how different things seem now. It strange how 3 grueling years of med school can change the way you see things. It's also funny to think they've never experienced the joys of pimping, or scut work, or guaiac cards, or noon conference, or M&M, or grand rounds; yet here they all stood excited as ever to dive head first in.

Here's to those with the cleanest white coats in the school!

It Blends!!

In my hunt for mindless activities to do this afternoon since I am home more days than at school this month(with the notable exception of being scheduled almost every Saturday and Sunday), I remembered vaguely having heard of the website Will It Blend? and decided to check it out. After all, one cannot study non-stop for their Step 2, unless of course your name is "First Aid".

Guess what! iPhones blend. And beyond that, blended iPhones sell for $901. As long as your ebay ad is explicitly clear that it is a blended iPhone and not a new iPhone.

Other exciting things that blend include:

glowsticks

iPod

EZ Cheese

video cameras

and even Bic ligthers.

All in all, it was pretty productive day for me.