Saturday, October 19, 2002

In case you're curious and want to see what the pan optic ophthalmoscope that I'm going to buy looks like, check out http://www.ewelchallyn.com/diagnostic2.asp It should take you to the page with a bunch of kits and the one I'll get is the one that has the nasal illuminator (see previous entry for discussion) with the battery handle that can use C batteries if necessary (yeah, you'll stop criticizing when the day comes that the electricity goes out and after the charge is gone from my toy that I can then pop in the last c batteries and continue to have light while you suffer in darkness cause your flashlight only uses D batteries that sold out before you got to the store). Anyway, it looks pretty cool wouldn't ya say? I'd like to thank those who submitted donations...oh wait, no one has donated to the fund except my loan money and well, I guess my parents since the other half of the funding is from my credit union account that was started and bolstered by them over my 25 years of life. Don't worry, you can still contribute to my medical education by being my guinea pig. Email me now to get at the top of the list. Remember, the sooner you get harassed, the less I'll put you through since by the end of the year, I'll know more physical exams. Don't worry, there are certain places on the human body that I will stay away from when examining family and friends. Yeah, you know which places those are. Forget the legal issues, those locations are the very reasons why they say you should never see a family member for medical treatment.
~me~ at 10:29 PM

So much for a good season. Yep, the ducks royally f%^&ed up (edited for content). They blew a 21 point lead and lost by 3. And why? Because apparently the defense was told that there wasn't a game today. My flag football team plays better defense! I should know, I'm on it. Argh! Well, let's see, we'll probably fall to a ranking of 20 if we're lucky since Arizona state wasn't even ranked. This is just like last year when we lost to Stanford. At least ASU was unbeaten in the pac-10 and we didn't lose to a crappy team (like stanford was last year). So frustrating since I took a study break to listen to this stupid game. And this week I didn't have my team to sacrifice for a victory since we don't play this week. And besides, what if I needed to sacrifice my team for next week's game. I hope they get yelled at for hours on end and tortured in practice for playing crappy. You know that's what I would do.
Yesterday at our football practice, no one really showed up to have a real practice so we just split into 2 even teams and played around for an hour. It was fun. Our little team won thanks to a deep pass I caught to tie us up and then Christina caught one for the game winner. Christina said that I had a big smile on my face even before the ball was coming to me and that I was smiling all the way as I caught it and ran it in for the touchdown. After that, I was just acting silly for the remainder since I kept laughing for no reason except that I was having fun being matched up against Jess. We kept knocking each other and making silly faces at each other. It was good. Well, now it's time for me to get back to work. I think I have allowed myself enough time to relax after the crap I had to listen to. How can people be so stupid? Great, you know the only thing that cheers me up is to buy something. Well, okay other things cheer me up too but the one thing that would cheer me up now is to buy something. And since playing the piano would calm me down right now, I am feeling impulsive to buy that $400 keyboard I've been thinking of since the beginning of the school year. But then if I buy the keyboard, then I can't buy the $500 ophthalmoscope and I think I want that more (I definitely need it more). My plan is to buy it using $250 from my bank one account and $250 from my savings account at the credit union. And I guess if I don't spend any more money on extra stuff until the next financial aid check then I should be fine. It was so much easier to save money last year. These damn extra bills suck. And this is only pseudo-real world that I'm living in. You know, where you get paid to go to school but have to give back the money later. Hmmm...I guess that's why they're called loans and not gifts. Anyway, I'm taking orders for gifts special from the city. If anyone wants seafood, sorry, I don't buy or travel with that stinky stuff. And I don't think I'll be able to bring back sausage either since it's going to take 12 hours for me to get to hawaii for christmas and the last thing I want to think about is packing frozen meat. Well, let's see what I can learn about restrictive lung diseases. they're all so damn similar it's a wonder anyone makes a diagnosis. By the way, just cause you wheezing, doesn't mean you have asthma and if you're not wheezing, that doesn't mean you're not having respiratory issues so make sure those EMTs give you the oxygen you deserve.
~me~ at 6:22 PM

Wednesday, October 16, 2002

Today I did some tutoring in the St Bernard housing development (PC term for slum area). It was fun as always but I ran into a little problem when we had to work on language homework. One girl had to add the end punctuation marks to a bunch of sentences and this one sentence had two possible choices in my mind and when I tried to explain that to this kid, she didn't seem to get what I was trying to explain. So instead, I taught her how to defend her answer choice against a possible loss of points for this one sentence in a diplomatic manner. Then I was working with this 3rd grade boy on sentence writing and that was painful because he insisted on working on sentences before he did the definitions for these 5 vocab words he had. So, the first sentence he came up with for the word 'plane' was "The plane is fly." Now, at first I thought he was being descriptive about the plane using slang but when I made him explain his sentence to me, it became sadly clear that he was using it as a verb. So then I had to try to explain what little I understood about grammar to him which obviously didn't work since the next sentence he came up with for the word 'skate' was "He is skate." Which makes no sense at all. So we worked on that one and then his next sentence, as almost torture for me or maybe his way of getting me to make up sentences for him was "Wow! He is smile!" From what I observed today, his strength is math since he finished that in no time but english took forever. He then offered to pay me a million dollars if I finished his math homework in terms of coloring the picture for him (one of those color the certain numbered spaces deals). After we established his lack of said million dollars, we had a discussion on what I would do if someone did actually have a million dollars to give me in exchange for coloring. And I said of course I would! I mean, coloring was the easiest part of that math homework and he didn't want to do it! But since he lacked the funds, I did no coloring. Then he did the definitions and here's the lame definition for plane that his language book had: airplane. Yeah, that helps! And for smile it had two definitions and the second one was: the act of smiling. It's like the definition for run: the act of running. Who the hell thinks of these things and then publishes them in a kid's textbook?!? Well, now on to kid #3. She took forever to do her math homework because she still does the fingercounting math and required the use of my fingers but she got it done and I guess there's no easy way to teach mental math except for her to be familiar with certain sums after lots of practice. Hell, I still use my fingers when I'm too tired to whip out that calculator or use my brain. Anyway, we then moved onto language finally and she was trying to get me to just let her do the 10 sentences at home where she claimed her brothers and sisters would help her and I tried to convince her that if she does it now, then she can play until she has to go to sleep. So at first the deal was 5 sentences cause I thought that it would take her forever to get the sentences done since it took her a long time to do the math. Well, she surprised me in being able to think of sentences quickly and without prompting and they were grammatically correct when spoken! Amazing! It took a bit longer to write them down because her spelling wasn't that great but she finished 5 sentences and then I kept saying, why don't we do one more and then when we got down to having only 2 sentences left, she ended up saying that we should do one more until we were finished. The bribe of the day at the after school center where this takes place was ice cream. And I'm glad there was still some left when she was done cause she probably would have let me known that she was pissed she missed out on that deal. Now, if you see grammatical or spelling errors in any of my entries, I don't care. Afterall, I did state that I wasn't the expert on this subject. In other news, no one appears to be interested in donating to the ophthalmoscope fund. Well, see if I let you play with it when I do get it then! By the way, even if you don't get to touch it, I'm still examining you. I need to practice to be good at this when it really counts. Not that your eye health isn't important to me. Good night!
~me~ at 11:27 PM

Tuesday, October 15, 2002

Success...finally! Today we had a large block of free time between two of our classes and Laura brought her panoptic ophthalmoscope with her. So we all had fun playing with it and looking at each other's fundi. And finally I was able to do it. And I think I'm going to get one of these fancy things cause I'll be able to use my right eye to look at my patient's right and left eyes. See, with the traditional (aka cheaper) ones, you have to use your right eye to look at the patient's right eye and your left eye to look at their left eye. Now, for many people this is no problem for their dominant eye but when you have to use the other useless one, you either are blessed with the ability to procede with no problem or you're like me and your eyes get spastic and useless all together. By the way, to find out which eye is your dominant eye, think about when you go to take a picture, which eye do you usually use to peak through the view finder? That's the dominant eye. I'm right-eye dominant so when I had to look at patient's left eye last year at my preceptor's office, my right eye was not able to stay closed for very long and eventually, my right and left eye spastically opened and closed and the effect is much like a trying to see something in darkness with a strobe light as your only light source. Get the idea? Anyway...while using the pan optic today, I tried to look at Laura's left eye with my left eye, as I had been taught to do last year with a traditional ophthalmoscope and again, my eyes got spastic. But later, I noticed that laura only used one eye to look at both of my eyes and came to discover the greatest thing about this spendy tool: I could avoid spastic eyes forever because the pan optic keeps you far enough away from the patient's face to be able to use my right eye for both eye exams!!! You don't understand how freeing this is! And I was finally able to see the optic disc and vessels easily and it was beautiful! On a side note, my optic discs were discovered to have crisp sharp borders with no evidence of pathology as diagnosed by Laura and concurred by the many other students who proceeded to blind me with the very powerful light of the panoptic scope. So, in august I thought I'd not buy one at all but it's so much fun that I want one so I can go around examining the eyes of my friends and family members just for sheer entertainment and it's so easy, that even you, the non medical person who will eventually be examined by yours truly, will be given the opportunity to look at my optic discs because I'm so nice and I think it's an experience everyone will treasure forever. This sounds like a telethon speech to get donations. It's just my excitement about the fun I had today but hey, if you feel inclined to help me raise funds for this pricey tool, feel free to send me money. Serious donors can email me for my address, jokers can just have a laugh and move on since it will cost me $480-$500 for this lovely tool. Why you ask? Well, the kit also includes the otoscope head. That's right, in addition to letting me look into your eyes, you also will have the opportunity to have your ears examined! Woohoo! I just knew you'd be excited! And the $500 priced kit includes an additional nasal cavity examining tool for me to look up your nose at all your snot and it also doubles as a splinter finder! Yeah, I'm not sure if I want that but for $20 more at this price range, does it really matter how useful/useless this would be to me? It's all relative. I mean, if I was buying a tool and it costs $20 for one model and $40 for the next model up that has something that I'd only use sporatically, then yeah, I'd buy the $20 tool but choosing a kit at $480 or $500, $20 difference seems almost laughable.
Now I have a new thing to add to my wishlist. I'm sure I have the funds to purchase this toy if I take a little bit of money from each account I have and don't eat for the next few months and sure, your christmas gifts will be at a lower price scale, but hey, I'll throw in a coupon for a free eye, ear, and nose exam plus a splinter hunt and that should make it a gift you'll never forget! The welch allyn folks are coming to visit again next monday so I guess I'll have a week to decide for sure. I am a little concerned since when they came in august, they said the prices were good til the end of the year, I think, yet online the prices are much higher than the sheet I have from august so I'm hoping to use this sheet to get those lower prices. Oh, this is like when I was a little kid and really wanted that Lego train but never got it cause my mom said I couldn't have it unless I helped pay for it and I was too cheap to even consider such a thing (her way to make me think that maybe I didn't really want it and to get her out of buying it cause she knew I'd change my mind if I had to pay for it). Only now, I have to choose between all the things I want and need. Like, I need extended cable tv (yes, it is considered a want to most people but I'm unique so lay off) and I guess I need food and then I need gas to get to school. And then I want a scanner at some point or a digital camera instead and I want an 88 key keyboard so I don't have to plan trips to the music school that fall apart anyway when none of the rooms are unlocked, and I want soccer shoes for flag football (see previous entries for my reason) and I want some other stuff that I can't think of right now because now I really want a pan-optic ophthalmoscope!!! Ugh, I need to marry a rich guy to take care of all these wants or at least get a good job so I can spoil myself for a bit and then get over it and get back to business. You know what's lowest on my list? A bigger tv. That I really don't care about oddly enough. Well, enough for now since I need to educate myself on obstructive lung diseases like emphysema and asthma. By the way, there is a way to tell if you have exercise-induced asthma or if you're breathless simply because you're out of shape so if you try to pass off your panting as asthma, watch out! Someone may make you prove it. It could happen...
~me~ at 7:24 PM

Sunday, October 13, 2002

Well, I discovered today that god even grants frivolous prayers even though he seems to ignore the mroe important ones. Yesterday I was about to have an MI (heart attack...gotta start practice using those medical terms) having to listen to the end of the Oregon-UCLA game on internet radio with the score being only 31-30 (oregon winning). In the waning moments, I made the decision that impacted my flag football team today. I "prayed" (i didn't go through the formalities of normal prayers) that if oregon could win then I would accept not winning my flag football game today. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, my football prayer was far less important than someone praying for a bone marrow transplant or surviving some other tragedy. Well, oregon did win and we didn't. We tied the T1 team but I must say it definitely was a battle of the defense squads since both offenses on each team struggled. I intercepted one pass and then sacked the quarterback later. I am disappointed in my kick off. I was practiciing excellent kicks and just didn't get the same lift in the game. Oh well. It doesn't help that the refs weren't calling penalties on the T1s for the same stuff that we apparently were doing to them. I was insulting the one retard (aka undergrad) and apparently that can lead to a penalty. It was poorly refereed but that one girl is by far the worst. At any rate, on college teams, players earn stickers for excellent plays. I earned 2 beers. If our offense can get going, we may win one and I will stop praying for oregon in exchange for my flag football team. But in the end, I'm still glad oregon won since a tie isn't a loss. Wow, the power of prayer. I don't know if this is a good way to gain faith in god's existance but somehow my oregon football prayers have always been answered as have my pathology exam prayers. I need to go practice kicking.

~me~ at 3:59 PM