The Barometric Mind

I woke up this morning around 5:30, very briefly--thirty seconds maybe--because it was raining, and although the sound of rain beating on my apartment's giant windows overlooking the South Loop is usually really calming, the water dripping through my roof, through my ceiling, and onto my already stained carpet is quite distressing. But I didn't stay awake because at this point, a stained carpet is very low on my list of worries.

I'm thinking about away rotations and my grades and how to make myself look good for residencies. Am I forgetting paperwork? Probably. Where should I go next year? Do I want to go to Maine? Stay with my sister? Or should I go somewhere I've never been before, working in a hospital in Mississippi all by myself. Do I want to do family medicine rotations or psychiatric ones? These are the things I've been worrying about, but I recognize that my worries are not really important, just bothersome.

The patients in the psych ward, now their worries are real. Your family can't tolerate your manic outbursts anymore so they have you admitted--you promise to adhere to your medications from now on, but your family doesn't trust you any longer so now you don't have a home. Where do you go? In this already stressed out health care system, you run a real risk of becoming homeless--or as the hospital I'm working at calls it: undomiciled. That's a worry. Or let's say you're psychotic. Then the voices can give you a whole new set of things to worry about: "you're going to die as soon as you leave here" they might tell you, or "you need to be back on heroin again--that's the only thing that can help you, this anti-psychotic sh*t isn't helping and you and I both know it."

I arrive to the inpatient psych floor at 9:30. One of my patients, on the spectrum of schizophrenic to bipolar, is standing in the hallway, leaning against a wall. She looks terrible. "Good morning Miss [HIPPA compliant], you look tired, did you sleep well?" She says no. I stand next to her for a good fifteen seconds, waiting for her to elaborate, but she does not, so I slowly walk away, looking back at her as if she'll suddenly want to tell me more. Later, when I follow the doctor around like her own personal shadow, we stop by to see my patient. "This morning the nurses said you were banging against the wall and screaming, why was that?" My patient answers back something about "the voices" which I was almost positive had been alleviated by her sudden acceptance of her anti-psychotic meds.

Another patient, depressive with psychotic features, also has a similar complaint. The medications had helped reduce the voices to whispers, muttering always, no longer commanding. But this morning, they woke her up again, yelling at her. She looks tired today--much more so than yesterday.

I am a scientist--but I am a bad one. For me, personal anecdotal evidence is much more powerful than studies that have thousands of patients arranged into double blind groups and blah blah blah.... This is why when I think of sickle cell disease--how my dad's a carrier, my mom's not, but yet all three of their daughters have the trait--I think that there's more than coincidence going on with how it's inherited--either magic or some genetic translocation oddities.

Which is why I know believe that weather can make you psychotic. Two patients woke up in the middle of the night, around the time I woke up freaking out about the rain, and were brought back to their presenting level of psychosis. Maybe the pressure drop affected the neurotransmitters as much as it affected the forecast.

Just a silly, crazy, insane thought.

That awkward moment when diabetes is kind of cool for once.

[Note: There are some gross photos to follow. If you fall easy to nausea, I suggest not reading this post.]

Alternative title: Microbiology: it's happening on you.

Having diabetes is the absolute worst*. Yesterday, for example, I took to much insulin with my bedtime snack and two hours into sleeping I woke up in a hypoglycemic panic, and before I could grab the glucose tablets by my bed, I began hallucinating: a giant centipede with a human face--a human face without eyes, nose, or mouth--broke into my bedroom!!! Intense!!! And terrifying!!!

Anyway, so usually diabetes sucks. There's the lows and there's the highs (this isn't figuratively, this is literally, as in my hypo- and hyperglycemia). Regardless, thanks to diabetes I've also been given a small arsenal of medical tools to tell me how my body is doing. Usually they're quite mundane. But in certain circumstances I can use them to . It's like having constant access to back-alley, outpatient lab services.

Seven days ago I sustained a large, second-degree abrasion to my left knee. Hilariously, I didn't treat it because we had just learned about skin infections in Micro and I wanted to see if I could catch something hilarious like staphylococcus aureus. As a diabetic I am technically immunosuppressed.

Regardless, my knee ended up scabbing really badly. [gross pictures to follow]

*Diabetes isn't the absolute worst. But in my own life, it is.

existentialism 'n stuff

Ah! I am pretty excited right now. We are talking about mycotic diseases. Translation=fungi! And funguses are pretty cool because A) they're not an animal, a vegetable, or a mineral and B) they're an important part of ecology and my love of that study will never die. 

On a more spiritual note, I thought of this during our first hour of microbiology, the hour we were introduced to virology, which has a complexity I'd never really thought of:

Sperm do WHAT?! oh yea, and Birth Control is Great!

I generally don't like to think about sexual reproduction. I mean, during mandatory sex ed in high school, I tried my very hardest not to pay attention because A) gross and B) I thought it would never apply to me.

But I've "matured". I've rarely giggled or gotten grossed out while reading over repro notes. Nevertheless, I've learned some things that I'm surprised I didn't know and things that are incredibly disgusting. For example: Birth control pills actually stop ovulation and sperm can live in your fallopian tubes for 1-2 days. What? and OH MY GOD THAT'S DISGUSTING.

But back to birth control, I don't know how I thought birth control worked, but I assumed you still ovulated. I guess I thought it somehow made egg fertilization by sperm (that can survive for 1-2d inside of you) impossible. But it literally stops you from ovulating.

So what's all this hullabaloo about birth control in the news? I can kind of understand why people are against abortion--wait, no, I can completely understand why people are against abortion. I can't understand why people are enraged that birth control is used in our society. It's not like you're actually hurting germ cells, which some people insensibly think are human (what would a haploid person look like? something Picasso-esque maybe?). And it's not like birth control pills are actually expensive to manufacture. Indeed, the advent of the pill probably reduced health care expenditure significantly, considering how expensive babies are.

I feel like there may be a lot of indirect cons to taking birth control*, and there probably could be a lot of scientific study into how the birth control pill changes human physiology... but I think everyone should agree: the pill is a far better choice than abortion.

*The estrogenification of our drinking water, the unnatural changes in female sexuality which increases the chances of sterile mating pairs, etcetera...

Ancient Medicine

I love physiology. It's a fun, and for me--a relatively straightforward--course. A lot of my fellow students have objections with the course director and primary professor. He is a very energetic old person and I personally like his notes, which is how I judge every single one of our professors:

If I can read through a person's notes and retain most or all of the information I've just read, that person makes great notes. You'd be surprised how many professors suck at this.

Still, he doesn't lecture off of power point presentations, which is the norm for almost all of our professors. Instead, he draws on a jerry-rigged overhead projector that is connected to the giant screen in Rhoades Auditorium. I like this method a lot, actually. It makes class feel less like a lecture, and slightly more interactive, although I know it isn't.

Regardless, sometimes you end up looking at things that have questionable content.

Like today, we were talking about the fetal circulatory system, and our professor found a mistake in the diagram--a diagram that he had admitted taking from a textbook published in 1964 and using for at least thirty years, if not longer. Below is the diagram (in red, my added comments):

Awkward...

Why haven't we updated to something more current? Or maybe something with color? Still, I guess it's comforting to know that the human body hasn't changed that much in fifty years.


But WAIT! Hold up... there's a mistake in this diagram. I think he said that the error involved the V's... they are supposed to be villi, not veins... but okay, so let's say this actually is a mistake... so people have been learning the wrong thing for 50 odd years? 


Medicine! It's an Imperfect Science!