signout | February 26, 2008Hey, look! A new book about residency. Man, my thing is so five minutes ago.
Would anyone like to venture a guess at the reason so many doctors-cum-journalists are men of Indian origin? I'll bet the Jews had something to do with this.
I've read the first chapter (which you can link to from the above article) and several of the authors' other pieces. They read well, and ring true. Go see.
signout | February 23, 2008It's been a while.
I've been in a demoralizing, soul-sucking stretch of rotations for about two months. Suddenly, sleep has become more of a priority than ever before, and documenting the details of my crappy life seems less important and ultimately, less useful than ever. Still, you people seem to want to taste of every plateful of shit that's placed in front of me.
One of the more recent combo platters was served a few weeks ago, when I was on a pediatric emergency room rotation. My first night on, I saw a clinic patient of mine who had been sent into the emergency room by one of our…
signout | January 30, 2008Friday, Thursday, Sunday--when you're working the night shift, they're all just words. Days run into other days and their names become meaningless, signifiers only of times when the mail comes and when it doesn't.
I don't mind working nights for a couple of weeks at a time. There's a kind of camaraderie among the members of the night shift, a smirk we share when we catch each others' eyes in the elevator and the coffee line. We all know that what we are doing is not normal, and in some way prevents us from being completely normal. And, we say with that smirk, it's cool.
When I work nights,…
signout | January 23, 2008Most of my memories of Charles are upside down. When I was a kid, that's how he carried me around--on his back, giggling; under his arm, waving at his knees; or thrown over his shoulder, poking at his armpit. I remember him as big, gentle, and quiet, with his mouth where his eyes should've been.
Charles was diagnosed with cancer around two years ago. With the support and love of his wife, Sara, he fought it hard. Every time I called, he was in another city, at another hospital, investigating another experimental treatment. But the kind of cancer he had wasn't an easy one to fight, much less…
signout | January 10, 2008You guys remember that DonorsChoose campaign in which Signout participated last October? Well. A project called "The Pencil Monster" was funded exclusively through donations obtained via this very blog. And because it was a great project, it got televised.
Behold, the 20/20 clip! (At this linked website, click on the video on the right to view it.)
You may ask how Signout knows about this media gem. After all, Signout may not seem like someone who spends a lot of time browsing the 20/20 website. The fact is, I was contacted months ago about the possibility of participating in the segment. (…
signout | January 8, 2008I switched on the boob tube the other day while folding laundry and somehow ended up watching children's television. (What? It happens.)
On Nickelodeon (motto: "Entertaining stoned adults since, I dunno, 1982?") I caught the tail end of a show called "Yo Gabba Gabba." Per the description on the Nick, Jr. website, this is an educational show directed at children 1 year old and up. Per me, it is freaking awesome. In the fifteen minutes I watched, I was urged to try new foods, not eat off the floor, and dancy dance--with Leslie Hall. Leslie Hall, people!
Well-intentioned and spectacularly hip,…
signout | January 7, 2008In response to a few kind inquiries, several gentle nudges, and an overwhelming quantity of porn-related comment spam, I'm posting again.
I'm not one hundred percent sure why I stopped. I think it has to do with my sneaking suspicion that my job may actually be just a job, and that really, not that many people care to hear about it. Feeling this way makes it easy to be lazy about chronicling the growing pains of becoming a real doctor, so lazy I have been.
On the plus side, my apartment is really clean, and I've been eating lots of tasty food and learning a lot in my primary area of interest…
signout | November 12, 2007Oh, the public's clamor is too much! Must Signout give and give and give until there is no Signout left, even for Signout?
I kid. It's not that my life is really all that chaotic these days, or that nothing interesting is happening at work, or that I'm incredibly depressed--I just don't have that much to say.
It'll come. Thanks for sticking around.
signout | October 29, 2007"Is anyone running this code?"
There were two residents in the room, one administering chest compressions, and one getting an arterial blood sample. Neither of them answered me; in response to my question, there was only the binging and bonging of various monitors ably detecting a dead man.
"OK, so, I guess I'm running this code."
Although I'd been looking forward to this moment for a long time, it was acutely uncomfortable in the way that being onstage in one's underpants might be. As fifteen people watched and waited for my decisions, I bumbled through the algorithms, alternately talking to…
signout | October 15, 2007Yowza! Within four days of my announcement about the Donors Choose campaign, you guys donated enough to more than double Signout's fundraising goal. You've raised nearly 600 bucks, kids, and I couldn't be prouder!
Of course, don't let that keep you from telling your friends or checking out some of the other great projects you can help fund at DonorsChoose.com. I've added a few new ones, which you can check out here, or you can search their project database yourself by all sorts of variables.
Let me also take this opportunity to note how absurd it is that so many of our public schools are so…
signout | October 12, 2007Last year, our very own Janet Stemwedel (of Adventures in Ethics and Science) introduced ScienceBlogs to DonorsChoose. Put simply, this organization matches a donor's funds with a grade school classroom project that donor wishes to fund. This means that if, like me, you go on and on about the sorry state of education in this country, you can actually shut up and do something about it in a very directed way.
A quick browse through the list of projects needing funding will open your eyes to the incredible devotion and creativity of this country's teachers--and the incredible dearth of resources…
signout | October 12, 2007One of my neighbors at Scienceblogs, Retrospectacle's Shelley Batts, has been nominated for a blogging scholarship--meaning, an award toward study given to a blogger of note.
The scholarship award recipient is determined by votes, and Shelley is in second place. In my estimation, she has a fine blog, and deserves this in a big way. Please consider visiting the above link and helping a sister out.
signout | October 11, 2007Whoops. Signout is so severely mellowed out that she scheduled her vacation posts all wrong. Oh well--just means fewer krazy kommenters to "huh?" at on her return.
As reparation, she submits this sweet memory of cluelessness from the archives, then hastily returns to picking sand out from between her toes. She promises to resume writing--and in the first person, no less!--next week.
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"Is someone down?" asked T., who was driving. We were on our way back from an intern retreat day in the mountains, and while stopped at a traffic light, we…
signout | October 5, 2007As recompense for the daily slog that is residency, Signout is going away for a much-needed week or so at the beach. She promises that when she returns in mid-October, she will be tanned, rested, and ready to resume taking everybody's shit. Meanwhile, please enjoy some of her greatest hits [in her own mind].
Since it's October, and therefore time to start preparing in earnest for Christmas, today's selection is presented as a seasonal offering. If you are a wacky gentile and it happens to whip you up into a holiday frenzy, Signout cannot be held responsible for your resultant purchases…
signout | September 29, 2007In addition to containing the Truth, the Science Creative Quarterly (SCQ) contains a whole lot of really excellent science writing. Some of it is by ScienceBloggers, but much of it is not.
I recently heard of the site from a Signout reader named Benjamin Langer, who himself has a very nice critical piece on intelligent design in the current edition of SCQ. Why I hadn't heard about this publication before, I don't know. I can only hypothesize that I perhaps have been living under a rock.
I have become a linking machine. Man, do I need a day off.
signout | September 28, 2007There's a news article over at The Scientist on the life science blogs favored by the unwashed masses (i.e., you).
Go there, and make your scratchy little voices heard!
Many thanks to Zuska for the tip.
signout | September 27, 2007I can think of at least 20 regular readers who need to look at Carl Zimmer's collection of science tattoos immediately.
Some of them are lyrical, detailed, and beautiful. Others are tight, terse, and smart. Still others consist of carefully considered text. All are clearly quite meaningful to their owners, and endlessly wonderful to me.
You know who you are. Get over there.
signout | September 26, 2007There's sad news from the HIV prevention front: trials of an experimental vaccine against HIV have been suspended in the wake of an interim data analysis suggesting it's not really effective.
Per the NIH's press release, the vaccine hasn't been shown to alter either the predisposition to or course of HIV infection in human subjects. There's no mention of any harm to participants, and it's worth noting that the vaccine itself is formed of synthetically produced bits of HIV-like viral material incapable of causing actual HIV infection.
Vaccine development has long been one of the holy grails…
signout | September 25, 2007In the resident room at our hospital, we have a dry-erase board that plays an important role in resident education. On one side of the board, residents write the emergency department's (ED's) diagnoses of patients admitted to the medicine service. On the other side of the board, they write the actual diagnosis of each patient. Although some of the words in the below image of the board might be a little fuzzy, I promise you, many of them are hilarious:
I'm not gonna lie: most of the words on this board positively drip disdain. Fairly or not--and certainly, as is common in many institutions--…
signout | September 23, 2007Next to my unfettered access to the ScienceBlogs Ski-Doo, my favorite SB perk is the weekly newsletter. Now you can live the sweet life, too, by signing up for the "Week in ScienceBlogs" email. It's first class all the way, baby!
The newsletter is great for picking up on the highlights of the week, including the best quotes from the week's blogging and other goodies. Bonus: Act now, and you'll get included in the 500,000th Comment Contest drawing for the trip to the world's greatest science city! Which, right now, looks to be an international location!
Be a champ, not a chump.
Carry on.