Hat Trick

Conference freshman of the year and defensive player of the year Greg Oden scored 22 points, grabbed 8 rebounds, and blocked 4 shots in leading #1 Ohio State to a 72-62 victory over Michigan in the quarterfinals of the Big 10 basketball tournament earlier this afternoon. The win caps a 3-0 season against UM in men's basketball and means Ohio State will finish the 2006-2007 academic year without a loss in the three major sports against its arch rival.

The Difference a Week Can Make

Another Friday, another Capstone class, another day of feeling bad about ... no, wait! I actually knew what was going on in all the cases today! How did that happen? I think knowing what to expect from the course now helped me calm down enough to let my instincts take over. I'm beginning to be able to sort through all the different tests, signs, symptoms, etc., etc., and arrive at a decent differential of diagnoses. They're not always 100% accurate, but progress -- substantial progress -- is being made as I type this. Neurons forming new pathways and connections, glial cells cleaning up all the garbage that doesn't belong, Vince trying to climb walls ...

[Abrupt ending. We've got a rotten cat on our hands here, folks.]

Torture on TV

Sula sent me an article this afternoon that makes mention of certain groups of people who think Jack Bauer is too violent for primetime television.

These people likely will not wake up in the morning.

Wit

This gem of a movie from Emma Thompson (2001, HBO Home Video) tackles head-on the issue of physician insensitivity in a medical field increasingly dominated by poor bedside manner. Thompson plays the role of a hard-nosed English professor whose otherwise brilliant career in academia parallels the obstructive roles professional hubris and lack of compassion can have in medicine as well. Playing a difficult role as a patient slowly dying of stage 4 metastatic ovarian cancer, Thompson initially delivers each line with the poise expected of an unforgiving professor but becomes more and more human as her life painfully comes to an end. She is the embodiment of what we loathe in college ("that" professor whose mother you would love to slap) and a reminder of the humanity behind the falsely fabricated mask of intellectual self-importance. No matter their past, present, or future, patients certainly deserve more from us than this.

Gears of War Obsession

The only video game I've played for the last four months is Gears of War on the Xbox 360. Normally I don't obsess over one game for such a long period of time -- even Halo 2 and Knights of the Old Republic didn't garner this much attention. In terms of dialogue and offering wide-open gameplay, Gears is below average. Missions must be completed in sequence, and the ever-annoying "sudden appearance" phenomenon (e.g., when the player crosses a certain imaginary threshold or changes rooms, new enemies suddenly appear out of nowhere) is used way too often for my tastes. Weaknesses aside, however, this is one of the more perfect system-based shooters available, simply for its over-the-top grotesque presentation, super-tight controls, and addictive adrenaline-pumping action. Blowing an enemy to shreds with the Torque Bow or chainsawing monsters in half with the Lancer rifle's supersweet bayonet never gets old.

Printing Party

Tonight Sula and I participated in our last printing party -- 228 pages of pure musicological goodness is now finalized and ready for binding, courtesy of Prior Health Sciences Library!

BooksBooksBooks

One thing I haven't held back on purchasing in medical school is books. Many of my peers prefer to obtain required learning resources online (either free through the library or in purchased e-book format), but there's something about the smell and feel of brand new books that I find highly appealing. Perhaps I'm a bit old-school, but flipping through page after page of unforgivably dense text and finally finding the answer to your question(s) is more rewarding to me than using an auto-find feature on a web browser.

In other news, I just celebrated my 75th birthday and am currently telling tales about how "there was no such thing as toys when I was a kid" ...