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Nail polish and masculinity
Background: Sometimes, making slides requires nail polish. To secure a cover slip over your sample and seal in anything that might evaporate, you need something watertight, fast drying, and transparent. Nail polish is the cheapest thing I know that fits these requirements, and that is why I have a bottle of it sitting on my bench. I also have q- ( Read more... ) -
Selfish complaining
Just found out that my best-bet lab didn't get funded. Damn. It's great how NIH just got a bunch of money, but it doesn't help me because it won't actually get distributed to any labs for quite a while (peer-reviewed grant applications take fricken forever). And I need to start my PhD in about two and a half months. Yeah. I blame the republicans. ( Read more... ) -
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Fact #13: "If you're not eating the brains of your loved ones, you're not likely to come down with Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease." Umm...yeah, that was just an interesting quote from class today. I think the point was that prion diseases aren't easily transmissible. We also learned that the man who won a nobel for explaining Kuru, the prototypical ( Read more... ) -
Facts!
Fact #12: The worst thing about doing physical exams is the fear you’re hurting a patient. Sometimes, you can’t do the exam without hurting them. You cut out the less necessary things, and you do your best. The patient will even say it’s ok. It doesn’t matter though, because you’re doing the absolute opposite of what you want to be doing. And the ( Read more... ) -
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Why is it that whenever people want to visit me, they pick the weekend before an exam? -
Impending doom might not just be in your head
Fact #11: A sense of impending doom is a symptom, and not just of anxiety disorders. It can also mean a heart attack or a pheocromocytoma, which is a rare adrenal tumor.
Today we had a seminar on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Several parents talked about losing a child to SIDS, and how doctors could/did make it easier. It was really good...in a ( Read more... ) -
The week so far
Monday it was all icy out. The whole way to school (2 miles, yo) the sidewalks were iced over, even in front of an elementary school. The crossing guard told me it was a sin, and the city should be ashamed, with all the little kids falling. I didn't fall, though, so I was proud of myself. You'd think Boston could handle ice better, though. I mean, ( Read more... ) -
Derm is not for me
Too much dermatology. Ugh. Last night, I dreamed about scabies. It was pretty gross. All the rashes are starting to look the same. I had this plan to just tell all my patients they have secondary syphilis. Then, when a dermatologist tells them that no, it's actually just psoriasis or pityriasis rosea, they'll be happy! Sadly, it seems people don't ( Read more... ) -
Something more unpleasant than studying for the derm exam
You know what sounds really, really awful? Pemphigus vulgaris. Owww.... -
Facts I learned in med school
Fact #10: AIDS impacts everything (medically-speaking). Every section we do, every drug, every disease, every disorder, every bit of biochemistry, every...anything, there's a mention of how AIDS alters it or is altered by it, or how AIDS has affected our understanding of it. It comes up over and over and over again, way beyond simply learning to ( Read more... )