A few days ago, eight weeks into my cooking project, I found a package of sliced cheese tucked under the vegetable crisper. It was rather moldy. I chuckled a bit before chucking it.
I used to buy that cheese every two weeks. It went in the same sandwich that I made every day to bring to the hospital. In the sandwich also went versatile ingredients like tomatoes, mushrooms, and spinach; they were things I could throw into random entrees to cover dinner. I cooked regularly before 2017; in fact, I got by all of third year only buying cafeteria food but once (a chicken wrap in Queens; it was meh). However, priorities were minimal thinking time, flexible utility, and financial efficiency. For four years, my food — including that sandwich — were boring.
Here I wrote a “52 project,” one blog post each week for the entirety of 2016, and by golly was 2016 a year worth chronicling. Continue reading Here I Wrote→
I’m drafting this post in my family’s hotel room in a resort on a beach in Cancún, Mexico. Before arriving, I didn’t realize that Cancún is on the Yucatán peninsula, where 65 million years ago a big-ass meteor caused a mass extinction that nearly ended all biodiversity on the planet.
But life went on.
I’m here passing some time during my two-week winter break. It’s a welcome change of pace. I feel as if I’ve just emerged, gasping for breath, at the surface of a deep dark pool of clerkships. It’s a suitable analogy not just because I went snorkeling in brilliantly clear cenote water but because last year actually felt like a protracted dive into the depths of medicine. When you’re submerged underwater, you’re acutely aware of each second of precious oxygen escaping, but each dive is over before you realize it. And when you emerge, you might be surprised to find yourself far from where you started, pushed askew by the powerful currents underneath.
Ostensibly my family and I were vacationing in Cancún, but although we did sleep in a beachside resort, we spent basically all of our brief trip taking shuttles and buses to excursions all around the Yucatán peninsula. Continue reading Cenotes and Ruins of the Yucatán→
A hospital floor is so noisy. Despite posting signs reading “Quiet is Healing” in the halls, it’s mostly an iatrogenic cacophony.
Some of it is necessary distraction, like IV Pump alarms, telemetry alarms, bed alarms, telephone rings, beeper beeps (lol, yes still a thing). Sadly, they’re all dissonant tones! Phones are B-E trills, heart monitors are a high B-ish, beepers are mostly F#. Why couldn’t they be harmonic in the same key so that when they inevitably pile up it’d be a pleasant chiming instead of this din of ding-dings we have to yell over?Continue reading Music Against Medicine→
Modern medicine has gotten really good at replacing organs. That, or modern medicine just lops off organs because they’re not vital. Here’s a ranking of the pieces of the human body ranked from least to most valuable, judged by how often/easily modern medicine excises or artificially imitates them.Continue reading Least Vital Organs→
