The Aesthetic Foot

Don't ask, but I need to know if you like feet... so.... Do you? DO YOU!!!? It's for an aesthetics editorial, a plastic surgery kind of thing. Here's a single question, if you wouldn't mind answering:

"You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand." - Woodrow Wilson

Saw this quote in an email and didn't want to forget it.

I've always been afraid that trudging through med school would stomp out the compassion and idealism in me. It's definitely easy to fall complacent in this day-to-day life, with our passion for service and community steadily echoing away... to be shelved as an afterthought that would (hopefully) return to mind after we happily receive our MDs. So I study. I go to work. I write emails. I feed my fish once in a while. I watch TV. Heck, I play Scrabulous all day long.

And then there's always some event that makes your stomach jump into your throat. A reminder from the past. Yesterday I received news from a contact in Vietnam that a friend of mine just passed away... died. From liver cancer. He was a middle-aged Vietnamese man who dedicated his life to helping street children (as he had been one himself) as well as young adults with HIV/AIDS. From the beginning, he welcomed me to this life of service, enabling me to participate and to also make a difference. He enriched my experience of being in Vietnam, my sense of life's purpose. And even though he was half a world away and I'd been away from Vietnam for over two years, his passing still stuns and saddens me.

I saw the Dalai Lama last week (Ithaca, NY) - the epitome of acceptance, compassion, balance, enlightenment, humility.... and, oh, "radical informality," which jokingly results from being a cute old Tibetan monk in monk clothing humbly trespassing onto stiff cultural territory in a foreign land (like in England where they have "Lords"). He wears those rather wide and endearing leather old person's shoes with big shoe laces that one day I'll hopefully get to wear when I get as old (or as wise) as he. He was asked to speak about the "Human Approach to World Peace," which he eventually addressed after warming the entire 5-10,000 person audience with is improptu greetings, humble jokes, and laughter.

I guess what brings these stories together is a simple thread of humility and service that I want to maintain in my life, for both self-fulfillment as well as the good of those around me. I don't want this thread to break due to blatant inattention. With this blog, I consider myself reminded.

Muffin Joke

Dangz, looks like I passed up a year of med school fodder to post about on this blogspot... oh well! So let me tell you my favorite muffin joke.

• Two English muffins are sitting in the toaster. (They are English, mind you, so they of course have British accents).
• One English muffins says, "Blimey! It's getting hot in here!"
• The other English muffin screams, "Bloody hell! A talking muffin!!!" (Notice the three exclamation points).

I'm rolling on the (library) floor laughing right now. Note that the written commentary in the parentheses are not to be said outloud. Ok, I know many of you have heard me tell this joke before and have repressed the memory, but comon now, they have British accents!

Another victory. Aaaah, feels good;)

Disimpaction, please

Good Lord. One of my greatest dry-heaving moments was when my (pseudo)friend Tony said that the poop came out like soft-serve. That's right, like ice cream. He was helping out with a disimpaction procedure on a little 4-year-old kid who hadn't had a bowel movement for days. Something called Hirschsprung's disease. The surgeons praised Tony for his belly-pushing abilities. If becoming a doctor doesn't work out, disimpaction service may be the way to go! Pew pew pew!!!

Anyway, here's somethin for all the med students out there:

Projectile vomitus

So, I'm the new lowly 2nd year med student on GM7 at Duke Hospital. GM stands for General Medicine. It's hard not to feel like a waste of space (and oxygen) when you don't know what you're supposed to be doing and everything is buzzing on around you. But once I figured out that I could find the stairwells by following the exit signs, things got a little better.

Here's a story. On my first day, we were on long-call. I'd been in the hospital since 6:45am. Come 11:30 pm, my intern and resident had to perform a paracentesis on a patient with massive fluid accumulation in her abdomen secondary to terminal liver cirrhosis. The room was small and a little warm in temperature, and it smelled of sweet urine. I was holding the patient's hands to prevent her from touching the sterile area on her belly.

The intern first gave some lidocaine injections and then whipped out a shiny foot-long bore needle for the paracentesis. He stabbed it straight into her protruding abdomen. It began to ooze blood. The patient cried out in agony and kept on mouthing words as if in delirium. Unfortunately, the needle clogged and had to be pulled out and pushed back in at many different angles to search for a viable fluid pocket, but to no avail. The resident then took out a scalpel to slice a larger opening at the puncture site. The patient kept on moaning in pain, saying "Please, stop, no no, please no more..."

The smell of blood began to permeate the room, and I began to feel a numbness creep over my hands and climb up my arms. I thought I could just shake it off if I concentrated harder... but then the numbness started creeping up to my head. I felt dizzy. I turned to the intern and whispered weakly, "I think I need to step out for a second..." Suddenly, I wake up realizing that I had just blacked out. The intern was yelling, "Shoshana, wake up! Wake up, Shoshana, wake up!"

It took me a second to realize that I was still in the same hospital room holding the patient's hands in the same position, only this time with the intern propping me up by the bedside. I thought I'd just woken up from a deep sleep. He said, "Shoshana, you ok? You can step out now." Stunned, I released the patient's hands and stumbled to the door. A split-second later, I bee-lined to the nearest garbage can and spewed out a projectile vomitus of gummy bears. Tragic, completely tragic. So much for my first night on call!

At least I got to mark my territory;)

Poop... gotta love it!!!

So, here's a decision to make. Pediatrics versus geriatrics. Cute kids versus cute... OLD people? Well, either way, I'd be working with diapers, right? At least that's what my prof told me. Pathologists have such a great sense of humor. It all seems to boil down to poo, doesn't it?