Dear British visitors: What’s with all the “fetus in fetu” searches for the past day? I’ve gotten over 100 in the last 24 hours , pretty much all from the UK or Europe. Can anyone tell me what’s up? Is this in the tabloids or something? I didn’t find anything new or breaking news at Google …
I love the way most of the media is interpreting the health care spending increases , like in the Dayton Business Journal :
bq(quote). The costs of health insurance offered through work increased 10.1 percent nationwide in 2003, a marked slowdown from the nearly 15 percent increase in 2002 over the previous year…
10.1 percent is great news? It’s still double digit, it’s still going to force businesses to drop coverage or cut costs for their workers. Some countries had 3 percent increases from 2001-2002, with the average increase at 3.5% per year, since 1975. Imagine that.
Update: And instead of that , we have this . How much longer do we have to be such an embarrassment to the rest of the world? We’re great at making a few people rich, but we can’t even take care our poorest? (via Metafilter )
Okay, fine, if sirenomelia doesn’t disturb you, this cannibal stuff in Germany better. After doing anatomy for a quarter, and spending hours alone with dead bodies, peeling through them, and flipping them side to side, I’ve grown a pretty strong stomach. We all have. But there’s a limit. We still freak out if a piece of fat comes flying out of the bag, still wash obsessively if one of our mucked gloves touches our skin. I remember thinking how gruesome and violent we were–cutting open bodies, pulling limbs from their sockets–but I now see the difference between medicine and insanity. (This is also eerily well timed to GruntDoc’s favorite Dilbert cartoon .)
Now onto the story. Armin Meiwes, this German in some small town, ate an entire person. Well, froze and then ate him. (Might be good to stop here if you’re feint of heart.) The Guardian has the story with the gruesome details, along with Yahoo and the BBC . This stuff makes my stomach crawl, and has nothing on Hannibal Lector, since this stuff is real . Meiwes met his victim over the Internet, and claims his victim wanted to be killed and eaten since he was a child. I won’t go any further, but I guarantee you the conservative right is going to find some way to blame this on the homosexuals. I think that I’m now ready to get back to studying, if only to get this story out of my head.
DevBio exam’s Monday. I’ve switched from lower limb and pelvis muscle to development. Luckily the practice exams haven’t been too tortuous (anatomy is a different story). We spend a lot of time in developmental biology learning about mutations and teratogens (things that cause abnormalities in fetuses). If you’ve ever done any medical or scientific work, you know that medicine has learned about normal development through abnormal cases. ( Phineas Gage is a common example used in Intro to Psych classes.)
So, anyway, sirenomelia is a rare developmental abnormality, where legs never form. Its root–sireno–means “mermaid-like,” coming from the Sirens of Ulysses’s voyage , I’m sure. When I was reading about the condition, I was sent back about 10 months, when I tried reading this book, Geek Love . I say tried because I couldn’t get through the first 100 pages. It was too trauamatizing. The basic plot is this: A couple run a circus sideshow, and in order to keep business up, the wife gets pregnant a number of times, and takes a number of different teratogens (like thalidomide , alcohol , exposes herself to radiation) to produce children with many congenital abnormalities. I guess it’s an interesting concept for a book, but it was too gruesome for me, I guess. (The old meaning of ‘geek’ used to be someone with some sort of abnormality or deformity, hence the title.) I don’t know why I’m writing about it. Study break, I guess. I don’t recommend the book.
If you want a good book, try something by Wally Lamb , You Shall Know Our Velocity , which I’m currently enjoying, or God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian , a little ditty by Kurt Vonnegut which might be my favorite book of all time. I try to give it to everyone I can.
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Old Boys Fancy Labias
(Obturator nerve is split by adductor brevis; femoral artery is split by adductor longus.)
Could’ve been “old boys fart lots,” but I find that generally the more sexual, the more likely I am to remember it. Go figure.
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* Dear Financial Aid and Student Accounts Offices: talk to each other . It’d be nice if I didn’t have to waste my time going across campus, writing you a check for $97.60, so that I can then register for classes, which then causes my loan disbursement check to be sent to me, which is worth a great deal more than $97.60. Don’t take this as an elitist “I’m above this” thing. It’s not. It’s a “this is really stupid” thing, especially during the week before finals.
* Dear cold and sore throat: Thanks for greeting me this morning. I’m kind of busy right now, so if you wouldn’t mind, cut it out. No. Seriously.
* Dear lower limb: I really, really, really hate you. You piss me off.
* Dear Gateway: Thank you for bowing to my bitch fest at your stores over the Thanksgiving break. The battery you put with this computer is really sub par, but you’re sending me a better one. Thank you.
* Dear readers: Please pray for me. I may actually need it this time.
It’s supposed to be the worst flu in 10 years, and 10 states are already in “widespread infection” activity according to the CDC. Flu deaths tend to occur in the elderly and in children. Make sure anyone you know in those two populations gets a flu shot–and you do, too. There’s clinics everywhere ( find one ) that will give shots, and they’re now covered under Medicare , too. And just so we’re clear, flu shots do not cause the flu . You may get a little sore throat for a couple days, but it’s nothing compared to what the flu will do to you. I was sick for possibly the most miserable 10 days of my life last February–didn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, dry heaved constantly. GET YOUR FLU SHOT. Flu Watch has some extra reading and maps ; sorry for their lame non-skippable intro.
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In my current quest to stay healthy before exams come up next week, I’m trying to do a little self-maintenance. Drink lots of water, get enough sleep, wash my hands all the time, take my vitamins. I’m hoping I beat any potential germs (take me after December 12th, you can have me!), but returning from the holiday break complicates things in several ways:
* I ate a ton of sugar over break. Pie, brownies, cinnamon rolls, cookies. Sugar always kills my immune system, or seems to.
* My mom was sick while I was home.
* I’m predicting a regression back to my old premed days, complete with a freakout and stress out session. Bad for the immune system, too. (And bad for the
memory: cortisones, released due to stress, decrease short-term memory function.)
* I was surrounded by coughing, wheezing germ factories (toddlers) on the plane.
* In my effort to wash my hands and drink lots of water, I’ve noticed this disgusting pattern in men’s restrooms, if I may. Why the hell are all the men
who pee on toilet seats really dehydrated? I swear, it’s rare you see clear urine all over a toilet seat. (I’ve set the other hypothesis, that they all
take lots of vitamins, aside for the time being.) Oh, and while I’m at it, what is
with
all the men that don’t wash their hands? Is this some sort of macho thing? It’s manly to be unhygienic? I think there should be two door handles in public
restrooms. One for people that wash their hands, and one for people that don’t.
Neurotic and a little nervous about these exams, you say? Bah. Never.
Link And Think is an observance of World AIDS Day in the personal web publishing communities. The project involves hundreds of webloggers, journalers, diarists and other personal website publishers, each linking to resources about HIV/AIDS or publishing personal stories about how the AIDS pandemic has affected them.
There’s lots of ways I could address the AIDS epidemic: policy, the gay aspect, the health and research. I already had an early rant about testing, and it definitely worries me that there’s been an increase in the number of reported cases over the past three years.
I think it’s partially a reaction to the late 80’s and early 90’s stigma against HIV positive people. There was such an effort to (rightfully) support people, let them know that you can be truly living with AIDS not dying from it , that HIV kind of lost its edge. Lost its danger for some people. I remember seeing a commercial several years ago featuring some swimsuit model or Ms. America in a boxing outfit talking about how active and strong you can be living with HIV. And there was a woman kayaking in another commercial, probably selling a new drug cocktail. It’s a double-edged sword, I think. You want to support people, but don’t want to spin it like it’s some happy-go-lucky disease that’s easily managed with drugs and has no other side effects or complications.
I don’t know who these not-freaked out people are that decide to have unprotected sex. I generally think people are pretty logical; the only conclusion I can make (and attest to) is some sort of lack of self-esteem and a general self-loathing. If you’re aware of the risks and how the virus is spread, the only reason I can see is that you see no future for yourself, don’t care about your future, or don’t care about yourself enough to protect yourself. (I personally see a correlation to not being able to marry (“partnership,” whatever you want to call it), having children, etc.) If anyone can spread more light on it, I’d love to hear.