Surreal

Imagine watching all of the nightmare scenes from Twin Peaks strung together.

Animated.

With lions.

Hat tip to my son. I don’t smell any grass on him, I swear.

D.

Launch

Oy, where did the weekend go?

Today, I launched a new blog: The Eustachian Project. I want to shunt articles from my medical website over into a blog format. Two good reasons for that: interactivity (people can leave comments at the blog, where they couldn’t at the medical site) and flexible searchability with categories. And a third reason: if I follow through with this, it will give me a chance to fact-check things I wrote 7 to 10 years ago. My post on ear candling, for example, is a major re-write.

Back to work tomorrow. This work thing could get tiring, you know? And in February, I start taking call . . .

D.

There be Klingons

From Wednesday’s post on Portland death metal band Stovokor, pInluH responds:

My mother has a smooth forehead? My mother would pick her teeth with your bones and then tell me what a handsome and good warrior I am, as a good mother is known to do!

Also; “Hab SoSli’ Quch!” is the proper way to insult my mother! P’tak!

Do you appreciate the significance of this comment? Klingons read my blog. Now, if only I can get that green chick to visit, I will have truly arrived.

D.

Heroes

By now, you’ve heard of the dramatic emergency landing of an Airbus A320 on the Hudson Rivers by US Airways pilot Chesley B. Sullenberger III, and you’ve also probably heard this pilot called a hero more than a few times, either. So I’m wondering: what makes this guy a hero?

What caught my attention (on Countdown) was the implication that the pilot’s successful ditching (that’s what you call a forced water landing) was heroism. That’s not heroism. That’s called skill. Phenomenal skill, but skill and little more. Why is it heroism — the fact that he didn’t panic, piss his trousers, and crash the plain? Heroism is not the absence of cowardice. Heroism isn’t even keeping a cool head in a dire situation. It’s not just getting the job done.

It seems to me that heroism requires both getting the job done despite considerable personal risk and having some choice in the matter.

Okay, maybe I’m being a hard ass about this, and it’s not like I’ve done anything to make me an expert. But I do think it’s worthwhile to think about these concepts critically. People throw that “hero” term around far too lightly.

Captain Sullenberger used his considerable skills to do what had to be done. He did it exceptionally well and deserves praise for it. He ditched the plane and no one died.

The passengers evacuated the cabin in ninety seconds. And then, with the plane sinking, the captain and the copilot went down through the cabin, checking to make sure all of the passengers had, in fact, left the plane.

And then they did it a second time. In a sinking plane, they double-checked to make sure there were no injured passengers left behind.

That’s heroism.

D.

We won!

Finally, after all these years, I’ve won an auction on eBay. Seems like I’m always bidding on things everyone else wants, and that those everyone elses really really like using those irritating widgets that bid for them in the last 2 seconds of the auction. I hate that! This time, I monitored the last two minutes of the auction second by second, upping my bid erratically to try to confound competitors who probably don’t even exist. But my desire to win had become gonadal in its singlemindedness, and win I would.

Oh. What did we win?

It’s

A VERY NICE FUTABA 6-CHANNEL COMPUTER RADIO SYSTEM T6XA (s) ON 50 MHz CH 50.800 WITH 4-SERVO’S, THREE ARE FP-S148, AND ONE IS A S3003, THAT ALL WORK EXCELLENT. THE RECEIVER IS A FP-R127DF 7-CHANNEL DUAL CONVERSION, AND COMES WITH SWITCH HARNESS, 600 mah BATTERY AND CHARGER. THE RADIO AND FLIGHT PACK BATTERIES ARE GOOD AND READY TO GO.

Jake wants to start building real combat robots, not those build-from-kit things you can’t even find anymore. Our first project requires only three channels, but this way we have room to grow — six channels (if I’m not mistaken) would give us four-wheel drive plus two weapons. Or perhaps two-wheel drive plus two weapons plus two blinky lights to send enemy robots into epileptic fits! Yeah, I like that.

With Battlebots coming back (supposedly), we have to work fast if we’re going to compete.

We bought a couple of wheels today, an R/C Solid State D-Switch yesterday, and we won the radio today.

I think I need a couple of motors.

Bet you didn’t know I was such a gearhead, eh?

D.

It has to be said

Happy Freakin’ New Year

I resolve to feed my brains to fewer zombies. How about you?

D.

Why didn’t I think of that?

Wish I knew who to credit for this one.

D.

The new boss, etc.

Do I even have a boss? I don’t know about that. I have a supervisor, but since he was my junior resident when I was a chief resident, I’m pretty sure I can still order him around. First time I try it, I’ll let you know how that goes.

He has a supervisor, too — what the organization calls a PIC (Physician In Charge). I don’t even know that doctor’s name. And I assume there are shadowy administrators lurking in their top-floor offices futzing with processes and action plans and talking about “drilling down on the numbers.” I get the sense I could work 25 years here and never once meet an administrator.

First day was all about benefits and IT. I’m gonna get a whole lot of IT in the next two days. Tomorrow’s all about EMR (electronic medical records) and HIPAA (government regulations, or maybe Highly Infectious Parasitic Anti-Aircraft devices — yeah, that’s it!) And more IT on Wednesday. Not exciting stuff. If I could fault them for anything today, it was the lack of coffee.

I spent the morning with two other new docs. One’s a psychiatrist and the other is a hospitalist. They’re both Chinese, so right away they had to compare notes as to what languages they understood. The guy spoke Mandarin, and the woman spoke Fukienese. This word, by the way, sounds like “foo king ease,” at least to my ears. It’s the language of people from Fujian, or Fukien, or Fu-chien. I have just enough Beavis and Butthead in me to WANT to chortle over the spoken word, “Fukienese.” If I were single, I’m sure I would have asked this woman, “Can you teach me Fukienese?” And then I would have laughed so hard, I would have sprayed her with saliva.

Good thing I’m not single.

The commute took 1 hr 20 min going in, 1 hr 30 min coming home. Kind of a drag, but you know what? I think I’m going to be happy there. And after what happened to me in Santa Rosa, I’ve decided I can put up with a lot if the job makes me happy.

I’ll keep you posted.

D.

die vielen leute

It’s easy to forget what a cross-section looks like. I never saw it in the office; there, I saw retirees, the gainfully employed, and their children. This is not a true cross-section. When you spend your life shuttling between home, work, and a relatively upscale supermarket, you’re insulated from society at large.

As docs, we see something close to a cross-section in our emergency rooms. But in the ER, it’s all too simple to fall back on old prejudices. This is not what the world is. Normal people don’t get (fill in the blank).

Jaw fractures, for example. With rare exception (we ENTs say to one another), normal people don’t break their jaws. Assholes who pick fights, they’re the ones who break their jaws. Or, more properly speaking, and one of the rare cases where the passive voice really does make sense: they get their jaws broken for them.

We did the DMV thing today: California license and registration for both of us and our vehicles. Folks waiting at the DMV truly do represent a cross-section of our neighborhood. Young mothers with their toddlers . . . two three-year-olds make an on-the-spot friendship, and when one kid’s mom gets called to a window, the girl waves and says, “Bye!” The other girl says, “Bye!” And because neither learned when to stop, the ‘byes’ continue for the next two minutes.

An old man stands behind my wife, talking nonstop in a perfectly ordinary conversational tone. A sign of the times: I don’t assume he’s crazy (yet), I check his ears for wireless first. Nope, no wireless — he’s nuts. He’s not holding a number, and no one bothers to tell him he’ll need a number before the DMV workers will talk to him.

Students in dreadlocks rib each other to pass the time . . . a Middle Eastern man insists to the gal taking pictures that he’s such a great driver, he didn’t need to read the handbook . . . an overweight white dude huffs his oxygen . . . a dad brings in his teenage son for his first written test. The woman taking my forms finds out I’m a doctor and chats me up about her panic attacks when she takes benadryl at night. (So don’t take benadryl at night.) Young people who seem to be compos mentis walk up to windows expecting to be seen. No number? See ya later!

The masses titillate me/scare me/bore me. But even when they bore me, I can’t resist looking, peeking into their lives. I can’t resist listening in.

Is there a word for that, to be bored and yet feel compelled to look?

D.

A journey for the rest of us

From The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers:

Moyers: Why are there so many stories of the hero in mythology?

Campbell: Because that’s what’s worth writing about. Even in popular novels, the main character is a hero or heroine who has found or done something beyond the normal range of achievement and experience. A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.

I used to think, “We can’t all be heroes.” I also used to channel Dirty Harry Callahan to my med students and junior residents: “A man’s gotta know his limitations.” I still hold by those words.

Some folks have to see themselves as heroic. I don’t have to, but that’s just me. If I wanted to, I could work some internal magic and see myself as a hero; the trick lies in one’s definition of “something bigger than oneself.” My family is bigger than me. My practice is bigger than me. Hell, my blog is bigger than me, way bigger, thanks to you guys. And if I ever manage to get a book published, that too will be bigger than me.

I don’t need to rule a nation.
I don’t want a corporation.

Which is not to say that we don’t need rulers or empire builders. There’s a place in the world for true genius, and there may even be a place for boundless ambition. We humans are builders, after all. Makers. We shape the world into the image of our dreams, and sometimes we create wondrous things.

But other people should be our bricks, not our mortar, and we should be damn sure we’re building a good solid brownstone and not the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.

A man’s gotta know his limitations.

D.