Mid-Autumn Festival

Today was the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋节 - zhong1 qiu1 jie3). It's also more colloquially known as the "moon festival" because one of the highlights in celebrating this holiday is eating so-called moon cakes. I love Chinese holidays because they all center around food (well, almost all). My two favorite holidays are Thanksgiving and Chinese New Years (I think I might've blogged about that before . . . a long time ago).

Because the Chinese calendar is a lunar calendar, the dates of all the holidays change every year. This is annoying as I didn't know today was the Mid-Autumn Festival until a friend IM'd me yesterday reminding me of it. So this afternoon, a friend and I made a special trip to a nearby Vietnamese store to specifically buy a box of moon cakes. And it was totally worth it. Too bad it's cloudy today and I can't see the full moon. :-/ *curses the Midwest*

Also today several of us met with local Hmong leaders to discuss the Hmong Health Education Program that an out-going M4 secured a 4-year grant for. The Hmong are a minority group within the Asian population in the US; they're a minority within a minority. Many of the older generation being refugees from Vietnam that the US oh so carelessly didn't treat well once they were on US soil. Holy crap I never thought it'd be such a daunting task! I mean, I had learned about this special population in my medical anthropology course in undergrad, and I had assumed things had improved for them in the last 30-40 years. Apparently not - they're still just as marginalized, the barriers are still up. The difficulty extends beyond "just" translation obstacles, there are fundamental communication barriers in reaching this population that we as med students are just not equipped to handle.

The M4 kept mentioning all these organizations that we might be partnering up with, but the task of communicating and coordinating all those groups might largely fall to us. And I don't think any of us - the M1s and M2s - expected to be given such a large responsibility. We had thought our main role was to develop culturally sensitive material to be used in radio broadcasting and in handouts/leaflets. Even this is easier said than done, as none of us on the committee (or probably in the entire med school) can translate into Hmong. We'd have to work really closely with specific Hmong community members at length to make sure the material is at an acceptable level of comprehension and accurately translated.

It's annoying that the M4 made many of the initial contacts, so they're familiar with him but not us. And since he's outgoing, that means he's not likely to have a direct participatory role in what happens. That bastard, lol. I think all of us M1s left the meeting feeling like we're in over our heads and the whole "What have we gotten ourselves into?" mentality. But, if we make this work (and we CAN make this work), it'll be an amazing achievement. Truly something worthwhile.

I Don't Eat Organ Meat

Today several of us walked over to the hospital cafeteria to buy lunch, because we get a 10% discount with our med student ID cards. The med school and several hospitals are connected via skywalks, tunnels, and hallways. So it took us about 15 minutes to get to the cafeteria utilizing 2 stairwells and several halls.

We get to the cafeteria and are checking out the food and the lines, debating what to get. And the following conversation occurred:

Me: Oh, grilled beef liver. Interesting.
Aiden: I don't eat organ meat.
Me: o_O? Umm, all meat is organ meat.
Some doctor in line: *stifles a laugh*
Aiden: Shut up! You know what I mean.
Me: But all meat is organ meat. Muscle is an organ!
Some doctor in line: *laughs while looking away*
Me: Seriously! You're eating organ meat anyway if you eat meat at all.
Some doctor in line: *continues laughing*
Aiden (to me): You're an ass.

I thought it was pretty amusing. :-)
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Apparently my anatomy lab group is "infamous" in the other lab. The anatomy labs are divided into two huge rooms by an "inner lab" between them. Today people from the other lab came by because they heard our group was able to nicely dissect out the chorda tympani, lingual nerve, and inferior alveolar nerve on the right jaw. We dissected out so many things today (well, people in my group, not me - I didn't cut the body at all today, just poked around in it), I feel so accomplished. Too bad that gave me motivation not to study after I came home after classes.

Anyway, I <3 my anatomy lab group.

Bar Crawl

To prove that I'm not always locked in my apartment studying (actually, I think I don't study nearly enough), I went to the annual med student bar crawl. :-) It's for the M1s and M2s to mix and chat.

My roommate paid to go but he lamely backed out and decided to go home for the weekend (he lives about an hour south of the med school). Apparently he doesn't like bars much and large groups of people tire him out. I think he's just being lazy and antisocial. -_-

Alright, before I go any further, I realize after typing up most of this post that it's going to get really confusing unless I create names for people I'm going to talk about. So . . . the cast of characters for this post are (all names are changed):

Aiden: white guy
Alex: Asian guy
Carson: married guy
Leslie: anatomy lab-mate
Michelle: MD/PhD gal

Anyway I met up with Carson and Alex in front of the med school (Aiden and Michelle soon joined us) and we all walked to the first house. We get there and go around back to the backyard. It was pretty dark so I could only make out people's silhouettes for the most part. Same thing goes for my rum and coke - no idea how strong I actually made it (it tasted strong). Note: it's been months since I've had any hard liquor, and quite some time since I last really drank anything alcoholic - so I could feel the effects pretty quickly, but I'm not a light-weight. I can stay in that "pre-tipsy" and "tipsy" stage for quite a while before getting drunk. We all stood around chatting and drinking a bit, wandered around and talked to some M2s. I make some vodka and Sprite drink (again in the dark, and it tasted stronger than I'd like). Then suddenly a cop shows up telling everyone that someone called concerning the noise we were making. o_O The M2s who organized the bar crawl had talked to all the neighbors in the immediate vicinity and they were all cool with it; however, the M2s didn't anticipate people 2 blocks down from hearing the noise we were making.

So to avoid a noise violation and ticketing, the party broke up in half and half of us went to the second house a bit early. We hung around out back and inside the house. I found Leslie there - she had arrived late and just gone directly to the second house. It was nice seeing her. We stood around and chatted some more, lol. Then we chatted up some of the Asian M2s (or rather they sought us out and chatted us up). One of them talked briefly about her Little Sib (the M2s are the Big Sibs to the M1s) and how she was such a gunner. This Little Sib wants to be a plastic surgeon, so yeah, she's a gunner. They're so funny. :-)

After this we went to the first bar (otherwise it's not a bar crawl). Michelle decided to stay behind at the house for a bit longer. There were already quite a number of other med students by the time we got there. Thankfully we found a place to sit. Carson mentioned something like 2/3 of our class is married (he studies with 3 other daddies). I hope that's an exaggeration but even if it's remotely that high, it still makes me sad. He had to leave around 11pm, which was unfortunate - but his wife was sick and she had work at like 7am this morning.

Soon after he left, we made our way (slowly) to the second bar. I found Leslie again, who we had lost on our way to the first bar. Some M2 guy was flirting with her for a little bit big time. When he was engaged in convo with someone else, we chatted a bit. Apparently she joined the LGBTPM student group as well and, like me, had to miss the first meeting. So here we were, sitting at a bar crawl, wondering what the next event for that group is and when it's going to be. Leslie joined Aiden, Alex, and I on our way to the second bar. Leslie and I had our arms locked (I think she might've been a tad tipsy, and high heels don't help) and we were somewhat flirting and commenting how much we love our anatomy lab group - how everyone gets along so well, how we all enjoy going into lab with each other, how we're all so laid back yet driven to get the work done, etc. Too bad she has a boyfriend.

We get to the second (and last) bar and it's packed. For whatever reason people decided to skip one of the bars. Being a small small town just outside a major city, there weren't a lot of bars to hang out at within walking distance. We quickly lose Leslie as she veered off in some random direction. Then Aiden and I lost Alex in the dense crowd, haha. Michelle was supposed to meet up with us again at the first bar. However, she ended up nursing this poor Asian guy for two hours who drank 15 shots of vodka or something within an hour and was vomiting all over the backyard of the second house. So . . . I never saw her again that night.

I wandered and wove my way through people, looking for a drink. And I found Leslie again with the M2 from the first bar who was flirting with her. He got her a drink (which she then handed to me). She went outside to take a call and I met back up with Aiden. We were standing next to . . . I'll call her Kat, a Filipina girl who's one of Aiden's anatomy lab-mates. She was being hit on by like, 3 guys because she really dressed up for the event. We chatted a bit and I met some new people in the process (my med school class is so big that there are still people in my class who I've never seen before). Someone bought a pizza and offered me a slice. :-)

Then Alex wandered back to us, somehow. He went outside briefly and met Michelle, who relayed to him the story of why she wasn't able to meet up with us. Outside I met Leslie again, who just got off her phone. She went inside, disappeared into the crowd, and came back with her friend and this fruity drink that I don't even know what it's called. After a while Alex and I decided to head back, so we said good night to Aiden and left the bar at like 1:30am.

Alex hadn't drank anything for about 2 hours, so he was more or less sober by the time we got to my apartment. I had offered to let him crash at my place if he wasn't up for driving, but he insisted that he was fine now. I was still a bit tipsy and would remain so until I went to bed. Alex was starving, so I quickly fixed him up a chicken fajita-like wrap as he played on the PS3 a bit. When he finished, I asked him again if he was sure he was sober enough to drive and he said he was. So with that he left.

So that was my night. I didn't end up going to bed until about 2:30am but I slept so well (as I usually do after drinking some alcohol). It was a lot of fun. I kind of wished I branched out even more and met more people other than the clusters of people I already kind of knew, but whatever. The M2 guy who principally organized the whole event was pretty cute I decided after a few drinks, but I didn't get a chance to talk to him through the throngs of med students. Oh well.

And now I must study because I'm so so so behind. >.<

The Curse and the Stuff of Nightmares

So I'm cursed, and the curse continues. It seems that every person I find attractive - without fail - is either in a long-term relationship or is married. I never noticed how many guys (and girls) in my class are married before now. It's like, Hey you're attractive and nice. *Looks to ring finger, finds a ring, damn*

Sigh. Why do I even bother?
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Anyway, last Wednesday we scooped out the brain of our cadaver. It was kind of tough because after cutting around the calvaria (skullcap), our brain was kind of stuck to the skull. We had to really pry it off. No one else's brains were stuck to their skulls. -_- An M4 helped us do the remaining scooping out, but he did a kind of shoddy job cutting the membrane that separate the cerebellum and cerebrum, so our brain kind of broke into two pieces. The brain is surprisingly heavy and squishy, but I expected this. So now our guy is missing the top half of his skull and his brain. Oh, and the brain's in a bucket next to our cadaver.

On Friday we dissected the eyes. That was actually really cool because the structures around the eyes are so easy to see (small as they are). Unfortunately, our cadaver had fat eyes. There was a lot of fat cushioning behind his eyes, so we just kept picking pieces of fat out from behind his eyes. Gross. We (and by "we" I mean the other guy in my group) dissected one of the eyes from the front so now it looks like it's popping out of the socket. And he bisected the eye so we could look inside.

Yesterday the professors and the M4s helping out in the lab bisected all the cadaver's heads. So now, not only are the cadavers without skullcaps, without brains, have their eyes dissected out, but their faces are also split in half all the way down to the mandible (lower jaw). It's pretty freaky. It's also freaky that the scalp is just hanging to the side, so sometimes we put it over the face and it just covers the entire face.

I'm still glad to have our guy though. The cadaver next to us is a creepy old lady. She had dentures, so she had this creepy-ass smile in death. They removed her dentures and put it on her chest. But still creepy - seriously, she could be in a horror movie. This is the stuff nightmares are made of . . . Good thing we all have a healthy sense of humor, especially with bone dust and cadaver bits going everywhere.

Oh, we also saw preserved deformed babies, it was sooo sad. By deformed I mean babies born without a brain (anencephaly), with their spinal cords open (spina bifida), with a huge head (hydrocephalus). For this reason I don't want to be an ob/gyn (there are other reasons too) or a neonatalogist.

Tagged: Interactive Game

So I was tagged by Tyler of Thoughts of a Gay Boy in Highschool to participate in his "interactive" game.

The rules: Answer a series of questions and find a picture to represent each question, then create a picture mosaic on this site. Make the mosaic 4 columns by 3 rows. The questions are:

1. Where are you from? (You can choose to answer with your country, state/province, or city.)
2. What's your favorite food?
3. What's your favorite drink?
4. What's your ideal/favorite (future) job/career?
5. What's your favorite thing about yourself?
6. What's the place you most want to visit?
7. What's your favorite body feature on someone else?
8. What's your favorite movie?
9. What's your favorite TV show?
10. Choose one word that best describes you.
11. What time period would you most like to have lived in (in the past)?
12. What's the next thing you're (probably . . .) going to purchase?

My answers are:

1. Midwest USA (it's boring here).
2. Peking duck (I love food, but this one is god-like).
3. Guava juice (the texture of it is so good!).
4. Doctor (likely pediatrics). I'm on my way!
5. My eyebrows.
6. France. There are so many places on my list, so I just chose a random one.
7. Torso.
8. Gladiator. Again, there are many so I just chose one.
9. House MD.
10. Dependable.
11. Ming Dynasty China.
12. Pizza (though I've bought already said pizza by the time I posted this).

Now I tag:

Blogger of Hellogenation
Charlie of Charlie's blog
Courage of A Beautiful Addiction
Dave83201 of Daze Gone Bi
Fer of The maudlin story of a bisexual boy
J of be kind cali
James of Just me
Jeremy of Falling Through the Void
Mike of Random Thoughts in my Life
S of Enjoy the Journey
Shane of I just want to be me

If you're tagged, please participate! But if you don't want to participate, that's understandable, no pressure. If you want to tag people when you're done that's cool, if not, that's cool too. If you're not tagged here and still want to participate, by all means please do!! :D

The (Student) Doctors are In

So this morning I was scheduled to volunteer at a free clinic for the uninsured. It was a great experience, to say the least. I'm going to bullet-point some things before I really get into it all:

1. Electronic medical records (EMRs) rock!
2. Charting sucks and is a huge (but oh so vital) time sink.
3. You forget a ton of things you really shouldn't during a patient interview.
4. The M2s barely know more than M1s at this stage in the game.
5. M3s and M4s somehow gain the ability to do physical exams lightning-quick.
6. Med students have better handwriting than doctors.
7. Patients are very very patient. Very.

Alright, now to flesh things out a bit more. I woke up before 7am (ick) so I could get to the free clinic by 7:30am. We see the first patient at 8am but patients have been waiting there since like, before 6am. o_O All the patients are currently uninsured, many just recently uninsured. The managers (current M2s) gave us a quick and dirty run-down on how things work, leaving us M1s scratching our heads and going "Wtf, how do we do this?!" It's all good - every M1 was paired with an M2. The M3s and M4s came in later with the volunteering doctors.

So the EMR rocks because it's such a nicer way to organize things. And it's really cool to be able to pull up a patient's old files quickly. On paper things get to be really messy, as I write all over the place in the margins in such a way that only I know the order of the things I wrote. But charting sucked up a ridiculous amount of our time (mainly because I don't know how to chart and was basically allowed myself to be dictated by the M2 who took the patient history with me).

During the patient interview, despite currently taking an interviewing course and have already interviewed a standardized patient, there was just so much that we could/should hit with each patient that I just kept forgetting things to ask here and there. Thankfully the M2 who was with me asked follow-up questions to mine to get a clearer picture of the patient's health. With my second patient, I kept forgetting to ask age-relevant questions about colon cancer, prostate cancer, and diabetes. Things that I should have known to ask from having taken so much cancer genetics. *Sigh* It's all good, the doctors and the M3 kept complimenting us on our collection of the patient history considering it was my first time. ^_^

We were required to have our stethoscopes with us, though we M1s haven't learned how to use them yet. They were more decorations around our necks. However, my M2 showed me how to listen for heart rhythms and lung sounds, as he just learned how. For my 2nd patient (I only had 2 patients in the whole 4-5 hours I was there) the M3 did a lightning quick physical exam. He looked like he was just poking and massaging the patient super-fast; it was pretty cool actually. The M3 was also really on top of his game, asking all sorts of questions and knowing all sorts of knowledge. I suspect our knowledge expands nigh-exponentially towards the end of our M2 year. The M3 was also burping out shorthands left and right, and I didn't even know half of the stuff he dictated to me.

I'm pretty convinced that med students have better handwriting than doctors. I wrote a prescription script for my 1st patient (w00t!), of course the doctor had to sign off on it. I made sure my script was legible. I suspect doctors get their bad handwriting not from med school, but in residency. Charting really does take a long time (still haven't figured out how doctors see so many patients a day; 15-minute time slots are NOT enough). I'm thus not surprised handwriting deteriorates to chicken scratch.

The patients we saw were very very patient. Triple emphasis on patient. My first patient had been waiting about 1.5 hours before being seen by me (and the M2). And by the time we were done with him, about 2-3 hours had gone by. The doctor who I presented to was so excited with this patient and used him as a "teachable moment." It was really neat, and I think the patient had a sense of humor not to be irritated after waiting so long. Also, our 1st patient was 66-years-old and should be eligible for Medicare (which would mean there was no reason why he should be seeing us). But he kept getting denied for some reason (stupid little reasons, silly government, ugh). The doctor wasn't happy about that, and ordered us to find the patient Medicare info and to help him get coverage. o_O

So yeah, that was my morning. My first real foray into clinical medicine. Saw 2 patients, wrote a prescription, did a ton of charting, dressed a huge sebaceous cyst (not doing dermatology I think), and learned more than a few things.

---TANGENT---
Hey everyone, Courage from A Beautiful Addiction is back to blogging! Head over to his blog and welcome him back!! :D
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Mask of Genetics

Genetics is a mysterious and complex realm, a field that frustrates and scares many. I've never explicitly explained why genetics is a field that fascinates me and motivates me. If you told me 4-5 years ago that I'd be so interested in genetics now I might've laughed at you. If you told me that I'd be wearing my Mask of Genetics now I might scoff at the thought. Why then is it such a focus of mine? Truth be told, I kind of "fell" into this field of interest and here's how it began.

I did a lot of research in undergrad. I first worked in a pharmacology lab that focused on the Ras oncogene (genes that are over-expressed in cancer) pathway - in particular its role in neurofibromatosis and breast cancer. Then I worked in a human genetics lab on genetic deafness. With some genetics research under my belt, I had a decent grounding before I even took the intro to genetics course. I continued in my one-year foray into grad school by working in a colorectal genetic epidemiology lab.

Also in undergrad, genetics was emphasized in many of my biology courses. It was taught as being the "thread" that united and wove through all of biology, and all of life. Through genetics we can better understand evolution, development, and disease. It helps to connect things such that things that wouldn't otherwise make sense starts to make sense. It's not perfect (is anything?) but it gets the point across pretty well.

Research!
Evolution Class
Mask of Biology I
Mask of Biology II

I then began to pursue my interest in genetics further, in grad school. I took several courses with genetics as the focus - how genetics was utilized in public health, how the public views genetics, how physicians view genetics, how med school education shies away from genetics and how this can be improved, etc. My friend, AG-F, is a genetic counseling student. So having her perspective had a huge impact on me.

At this time, with the more I learned about genetic diseases and cancer genetics, it began to become a bit more "real." I had a friend whose cousin had/has colorectal cancer in his early 20s. And towards the end of the semester my friend, RZ-F, calls me to tell me someone who used to live in her hall sophomore year died of colorectal cancer. At age 22. I had vaguely known him. Something like this was obviously genetic in nature. In fact, with my (public heath) knowledge I could diagnose that without even having to think. How could it have been missed? How could his doctor(s) not notice? Did they not take an accurate and detail family history? Was he adopted? So many questions, so many frustrations that I could know "so much" and be able to do absolutely nothing.

Apparently genetics is something most physicians avoid or forget easily (or never learned it well in the first place). As such, genetic conditions are often missed or misdiagnosed. I had endeavored then, as I had all semester long, to continue to teach my undergrad students about genetics with a health "twist" so that even if they never take a genetics course again, it lingers in the back of their mind. The least I could do (at that point) was educate the generation or two of potential physicians and researchers after me about the emerging importance of genetics in health and medicine.

Just Gotta Press On
Too Epic
Mask of Teaching

Perhaps above all, genetics holds this kind of awe and mysticism for me. It's difficult to explain, but there's something to be said for genetics to be a literal and metaphorical link between all people and all organisms. That we share over 99% of our DNA with the person next to us, that we share the same building blocks as the food we eat, as the diseases that make us sick, as the grass and the trees and the animals. And DNA operates without consciousness, it just continues to work almost flawlessly every second of every minute of every hour of every day.

0.01%
Life is for the Living
Masks of Sexuality I
The "Gay Gene" Part I
The "Gay Gene" Part II
The "Gay Gene" Part III

Hopefully after this one would have a clearer view of my Mask of Genetics. If not, read the links in this post to all my past posts with a heavy genetics emphasis to them (and likely there are a couple I missed). It's clear that genetics permeates many posts in my blog and blends into several of my other Masks. I suppose in a sense it's also the "thread" that binds parts of my blog and some of my Masks together with me.