Monday, August 27, 2007

Engaged?

So I posted some pictures of my last party on Facebook. One of them had a friend of mine sticking his ass in another girl's face. The catch is that this guy's engaged to another girl. A hot one I might add. And he didn't want his fiancee to see him having fun, so I had to take down the picture.

But all of this seems strange to me. If your girlfriend/fiancee is going to get mad at you for something like that, are you sure you're with the right person? After all, you are who you are.

Sunday, August 26, 2007

Today's trauma surgery story

Last night a man got piss drunk at a party. So drunk that his friends ask him to leave. This infuriates him to the point that he decides to kill himself. He gets his gun and calls his friend. "Hey, which side of my chest is my heart on?" he asks. Thinking quickly, his friend says "It's on your right." The man shoots himself and ends up in the ER, where, according to the trauma surgeon, he was "hopping mad that he wasn't dead."

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Crazy people

Have you ever thought about killing yourself? Have you ever tried? Do you feel undeniable urges to do certain things? Has all of this destroyed your life?

Today in class, a patient from the psychiatric hospital visited us. A psychiatrist interviewed him for about an hour in front of all 100 of us. I couldn't believe it. He told his story in exquisite detail. How he bought $18,000 of gold for his friends in Cancun. How he lay in bed for weeks at a time thinking only about how miserable he was. How he needed to pound his chest with his hand, and if he didn't, how he felt that his head would explode. How he jumped off a roof to try to kill himself. The horrible car accident of his youth. How his father died a slow, drawn-out death from cancer. How his mental illness had caused his till-then perfectly normal and successful life to disintegrate. And most recently, how he slit his wrists, only to awaken in the hospital.

And yet, with all our medical advances, there is only a limited amount we can do. Drugs have helped him greatly, but not enough. There is still much to do.

This is your brain...

A few days ago, we started dissecting brains. Ours was in a large plastic bucket underneath the sink in the lab. I brought the bucket to the table and then opened it, releasing the all-too-familiar stench of formaldehyde. Then I reached in and took it out, let it drip for a while, and then put it on a blue cafeteria tray. I took some tweezers and slowly peeled away the membranous covering, revealing every little indentation, gyrus, and fissure. My group worked for an hour, trying to identify different lobes and areas with fair success. Then I put the brain back into its bucket, and scraped all the little pieces we had picked off into the same bucket. This was important because all of these pieces would later be cremated and returned to the original body.

At the time, I didn't think much about it. But later I wondered... Were this person's memories still in there, encoded in the connections between the neurons? What would they think about having perhaps their most intimate organ being poked and probed like this? And how can something so small define all of who we are?