An oldie but a goodie, The
Cyborg Name Generator
now has its own domain. I’m, of course, Graham, the General Robotic Android Hardwired for Assassination and Mathematics. I’m a pacifist and hate calculus,
but it’ll have to do.
And I almost forgot, again from Neuro lecture: Mike the Headless Chicken ! (He’s running for President in 2004.)
As the beautiful story goes…
bq(quote).. September 10th, 1945 finds a strapping (but tender) five and a half month old Wyandotte rooster pecking through the dust of Fruita, Colorado. The unsuspecting bird had never looked so delicious as he did that, now famous, day. Clara Olsen was planning on featuring the plump chicken in the evening meal. Husband Lloyd Olsen was sent out, on a very routine mission, to prepare the designated fryer for the pan… A skillful blow was executed and the chicken staggered around like most freshly terminated poultry.
When Olsen found Mike the next morning, sleeping with his “head” under his wing, he decided that if Mike had that much will to live, he would figure out a way to feed and water him. With an eyedropper Mike was given grain and water. It was becoming obvious that Mike was special… It was determined that ax blade had missed the jugular vein and a clot had prevented Mike from bleeding to death. Although most of his head was in a jar, most of his brain stem and one ear was left on his body. Since most of a chicken’s reflex actions are controlled by the brainstem Mike was able to remain quite healthy.
In the 18 MONTHS that Mike lived as “The Headless Wonder Chicken” he grew from a mere 2 1/2 lbs. to nearly 8 lbs. In a Gayle Meyer interview Olsen said Mike was a “robust chicken – a fine specimen of a chicken except for not having a head.” Some longtime Fruita residents, gathered at the Monument Cafe for coffee, also remember Mike – “he was a big fat chicken who didn’t know he didn’t have a head” – “he seemed as happy as any other chicken.”
p. Which just goes to show you: chickens don’t need a brain to live (their brainstem does most of the work), and chickens have no problem getting their heads chopped off. (Sorry, PETA. Don’t hurt me.)
Completely stolen from today’s lecture on the auditory (hearing) system, I’ve got two little multimedia pieces for readers today:
* First, a little cochlear damage. The
cochlea
is a spiral-shaped structure in your inner ear (past your eardrum) that lets people hear. It’s got
tiny hair cells
that move in response to vibrations (sound waves), and, well, to make a long story short, they’re how you hear. But you can lose these hair cells–from old
age, from over-exposure to loud sounds, and depending on the pitch of the sounds, you lose hair cells in a certain area of your cochlea. A great picture to illustrate
it:
* And for my favorite–like I mentioned above, the hair cells respond to certain frequencies of vibrations. And one type of these hair cells actually contract when they detect a certain frequency. Even faster than our muscles contract. Anyway, a scientist in the UK isolated one of these contractile hair cells (an outer hair cell), and attached a small voltage sensor and speaker to the cell. Ladies and gentlemen, I present, for your viewing and auditory pleasure, please turn up those speakers and give a warm welcome to… THE DANCING HAIR CELL OF LONDON ! (5.2 MB mpeg file).
I guess it’s fitting that at the same time a Congressman introduces a bill to punish anyone who uses George Carlin’s 7 dirty words , the Canadian Medical Journal has research to examine Words used by children and their primary caregivers for private body parts and functions .
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Damn. 62, and I’ve only been here 4 months.
The following scale has been developed in close cooperation with the UVA psychiatry services. It is designed to test if you have spent too much time in medical school and whether you are having adverse side effects due to prolonged exposure. Score one point for each statement that applies to you.
1 You have ever said “Netter is god”.
2 You can discuss autopsy/ anatomy over a meal
3 You own a 4 color pen
4 -it just isn’t enough colors for you
5 You use more than one color to take notes
6 You have use up more than 6 highlighters in the past 6 months
7 you have ever highlighted something YOU wrote
8 you retype handouts given in class
9 you haven’t had a date in 3 months
10 you haven’t had a date since entering med school
11 you have not been able to remember the normal term for something because you were thinking of the medical term (ie reflux for heartburn)
12 You get more sleep in lecture than at home
13 You know the correct spelling for pruritus
14 -you also know what it means
15 You have ever asked a question in class
16 -The prof. didn’t understand the question
17 -you didn’t believe the answer the prof. gave
18 -you went to look it up to see if they were right
19 You can’t hold a conversation on anything other than med school
20 You skip class to study
21 You’ve said you didn’t do well on a test on which you beat the mean
22 You spend more than 15 hrs a week on e-mail
23 You have a callous on you finger from writing
24 More than one professor knows you by name
25 When you ask a question, a new professor has said “Oh, I’ve heard of you”
26 You can name more amino acids than past presidents
27 You use more than 5 acronyms an hour when talking
28 you actually know what PERRLA stands for
29 You know all the steps of the TCA cycle
30 You do not read PTA as parent teachers association
31 You can remember the muscles in the forearm
32 You know the strucures in the urea cycle
33 You know the dermatome distribution
34 You can’t remember what you had for breakfast
35 You can’t spell world, much less backwards
36 You’ve ever been sexually aroused by the breast shadow on an X-ray
37 You equate “morning stiffness” with Rhematoid Artheritis
38 You actually know normal values for plasma Na
39 -K
40 Missing class causes you extreme stress
41 You have seriously asked someone “So how does that make you feel?”
42 You have asked will this be on the exam
43 -Just after the prof. said it wouldn’t
44 You identify with Deb on E.R.
45 You have made a medical joke
46 -no one laughed
47 -You figure they just weren’t that far in their studying
48 You wear your stethescope around your neck on the bus
49 -you don’t even know which way the thing goes in your ears
50 “SOB” means short of breath to you
51 You have gone to student health with suspicion of a disease you have studied
52 -within 3 days of the lecture
53 You have answered a question in class
54 -asked by the professor
55 -it was a rhetorical question
56 You can quote lines from the movie “Malice”
57 -you believe them
58 You can flip your pen over your thumb
59 -with both hands
60 -you do so throughout class
61 You have corrected a professor in class
62 -the rest of the class didn’t understand the lecture to begin with
63 You know how to claculate specificity
64 -positive predictive value
65 -anion gap
66 -you can’t balance your checkbook
67 You don’t know what the weather was like for the past week
68 You don’t know what the weather is like right now
69 You actually talk in open ended questions
70 DIC isn’t a slang term for the penis in your book
71 You think B-is a bad grade
72 you have stressed about a pass/fail class
73 You study during most of your meals
74 You saw nothing abnormal about the Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
75 You draw all of the slides not already provided in the handouts
76 -including the cartoons (humourous type)
77 Anatomy makes you hungry
78 You would even consider saying “Ease back on my finger at your own pace”
79 You know the size of a RBC
80 -you don’t know the size of a football field
81 Your eyesight has worsened by 10 pts or more in the last year
82 You have the library hours memorized
83 Hou have your own seat in the library
84 You score more than 95 on the Epidemiology final
85 You own more than one white coat
86 You have debated between giving up sleep or eating in order to find more time to study
87 You started studying for boards more than 2 months in advance
88 You have never received a personal invitation to discuss your grades with the dean
89 A tie is the only addition necessary to what you normally wear when you go to see patients
90 You wear scrubs to tests
91 You have made plans to study on a beach during vacation
92 -you actually did
93 You have a designated seat in lecture
94 -You have ever asked someone to move from “your seat”
95 You sleep less than 4 hrs a night
96 -you think that is plenty
97-you have thought about cutting back
98 You study more than 35 hrs outsid of class
99 -you think you are a slackard
100 You think everyone answers yes to most of these questions
Scale
<20 You're not in Med school.Go back to your party and leave us alone.We have work to do. 20-35 Either Med school is a breeze or you like the sound of "Senor doctor"
35-45 Gotta love that Primary Care 45-60 Well, I never really thought about MD/Phd, but now that you mention it... 60-75 Your social life is shot, might as well try
to earn lots of money 75-90 Which surgery subspecialty did you say you liked? 90+ All hail, great Med School Nerd master.
I need a kid around me constantly to do cute stuff like this all the time. Helps remind me why I’m going through all this to begin with. Story from Thomas’s dad, I think, over at Rondayview , and more about Thomas’s condition . (I have also clearly lost the innocence that was my youth, as I instantly interpreted the “do not get any ideas” comment as something sexual. Oh well. It had to go sometime.)
I posit that It’s completely normal, in the span of one night, to have a dream that a) your 19-year-old brother has spina bifida that you somehow just detected, and that you’re arguing with a classmate on whether it’s “iliosquamous” or “iliopsoas” (and you, of course, are right). And if it’s not normal, then, I was, uh, just wondering. Hypothetically. Yeah.
I’m usually not one for painting with broad strokes, and in no way do I think that all lawyers are evil (just most), but Rangel’s got some pretty damn funny law-versus-medicine snippets .
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Been too busy and concurrently lazy to post lately, but I figured I’d give a couple updates and lessons I’ve learned:
* If you think it’s a cervix, it’s probably an ejaculatory duct. We had an anatomy walkabout (where they pin different things and we have to ID them) on the abdomen and the pelvis, and, yet again, I made a stupid mistake. Maybe it was from the lack of sleep. Maybe I’m just an idiot. Now maybe this is me setting my standards too high, but I think if they pin the ejaculatory duct, I should reasonably be able to tell that the answer “cervix” probably ain’t right. Especially when there’s a penis right there on the body. Urology, proctology, and ob/gyn have just been ruled out.
* The medical community is not telling you the truth about your amniotic fluid. When you take health class, or ever talk about pregnancy in class, the amniotic fluid is just this vague fluid that somehow develops to cushion the infant. It’s just kind of there, and you don’t generally ask what it is, or how it got there. And now I know why. Y’see, the amniotic fluid is basically, uh, fetal pee. It’s quite a beautiful cycle. You drink your pee, pee it out, bathe in it, and drink it again. No, really. If you’re really all that curious, there’s much more information about it , but really, ignorance is, without a doubt, bliss.
* It’s all about who you know. I just got a job working with the Virtual Labs Project , and I’m pretty excited about it. I’ll be doing some Flash animations and slowly learning how everything works, but I ended up finding out about the position from an older med student who saw my website and thought I had potential. Sniff. I’ll try not to get too emotional. Thanks, Phil .
* Damn. The body is amazing. Glad to report that my sense of wonder continues to develop. Just going over heart sounds on Friday, I was reminded at how mind-boggling it is that all these complicated things are happening, every beat, in the body. Muscles squeeze, valves fly open or snap shut, pressures rise and fall… and it all happens so naturally and quickly that to begin to understand it, you have to really slow down the process in your head. But then, you realize that the dynamics change so quickly that it’s almost impossible to follow the process real-time in your mind. Although your heart has no problem pumping, without stopping, for 76 years. I won’t even being to talk about its development, save for a quote from a Embryology professor: “It’s as if you had to make a cruise-liner engine from a tiny speedboat motor, in the course of 9 months, the only other stipulation being that you’re never allowed to stop the engine from running.”
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