Williams College

Watching the end of the Red Sox vs. Yankees game tonight brought back a flood of memories for some reason.

The announcer mentioned a crisp autumn night in Massachusetts with a low in the 40's, and I remember exactly how that felt. I miss college. I miss Williamstown.


Looking at the colors change from my room in the Greylock Quad. Warming my hands with my breath while rowing on lake Onota. Running up Mount Greylock for another year. Snuggling underneath my down comforter while watching a movie. Riding my bike to Vermont and back.

Candle light

Tonight I decided to study by candle light. So I lit every candle I own, and read. I took a few pictures to capture the scene, and here they are. Click on the pictures for a better view.

Today in Psychiatry, we interviewed our first psychotic patient. She was a middle-aged woman who claimed that she had walked to Memphis while picking up trash to make the world a better place. When we asked her where she slept at night, she said she went back home to Nashville. Every night. She said she was picking up government papers and putting them in a trash bin. She didn't say why.

After that, the psychiatrist told us about catatonia - a state where the patient is like a statue for prolonged periods. He told us that he saw a woman who would lie on her back with all four limbs in the air, perfectly still for hours. You could go up to her and position her limbs any way you wanted, and they would remain in that exact position for hours. And every once in a while, she would snap out of her state, and in a burst of activity, run down the hall for about 5 seconds, only to freeze into another statue-like form. This continued for two days. The cool thing is that the doctor gave her some drug, and after one minute, she sat on her bed and told him what the past two days were like for her.

The most amazing thing of the day is that a good third of my class still does not believe that schizophrenia is a brain disorder.

I spent an hour on my balcony this evening, just sipping a beer, watching the traffic go by, and admiring the lighting on the church down the street. It rained all morning. But when I came out of the medical center at 5 or so, it was perfect outside. The air was cool and had that post-rain smell, and the sky was a bight blue with thin wispy clouds.

So the balcony it was. There were lots of people running by on the sidewalks. More than usual. Sometimes it seems like half of Nashville runs by.

Then the firetruck left from the station, sirens blaring. Soon after, five emergency vehicles went by, in what can only be described as a flying-V formation, with three police cars forming the V, an ambulance in the protected position, and a fire SUV bringing up the rear. Must have been a big accident somewhere down the road.

Technical difficulties

Today I woke up early (6:30), did my usual morning routine, and then left the condo. Just as the door closed behind me, I had a feeling of "oh fuck." I reached into my pocket, and realized that my keys were sitting on the kitchen island. I was locked out. I went down to the lobby and opened my neurology notes and started studying, with several residents giving me quizzical looks as they went to their cars. The maintenance guy would show up soon, and he could let me in.
An hour and a half passed. I called him. Apparently he was having "technical difficulties with his car" which is entirely understandable because it's a Dodge truck older than I am. He gave me directions on how to break into his office (with a hidden key) and open his key box.
Now, all the keys in his "key box" have a letter code, only decipherable with his computer, which I also had to start. But he screwed up the code somehow, so I simply took all 60 keys with me and tried them until one finally worked. And I had to explain the whole story to the lady across the hall when she came out to find a giant pile of keys on the floor, me trying one after the other.

Then I drove to the dentist, where my favorite dental hygienist scraped on my teeth for an hour. You know that feeling when somebody plays with your hair? I like that too, but I get the same feeling when somebody scrapes plaque from my teeth. I just close my eyes and relish every moment. Ahhhhhhh...

measure twice...

Yesterday as a study break I decided to put some speakers in the living room's ceiling. I got them on Ebay for cheap, and they came a few days ago. I measured the diameter of the speaker, putting one end of the tape measure on 1 inch, and reading the other. It's more accurate that way. The plan was to subtract that one inch. That was the plan at least. Now I have a BIG hole in the ceiling. A 12.5 inch hole to be exact. For some cool photographs, visit http://www.jamesbrittin.com

Birkenstocks

My birkenstocks were looking pretty dirty today, so I washed them in the kitchen sink. Since they are basically the only shoes I wear, I wanted the dried quickly, so I put them in the oven at 190 degrees (not that hot, right?) Well, the soles shrank to half their original size, and came off the rest of the sandal. Fuck.

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.

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."

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?