A Stick and a Burn

Another week has come and gone. What does it all mean? Personally I’m not sure, but if one were to believe the Adbusters I picked up and started reading over the weekend, then one might argue:

“It isn’t just bombs, police raids on TV, and “sleeper cells”: terrorism also comes wrapped in plastic. The embrace of consumer society inflicts a different brand of terror upon the world. The monster ego is born uncontrolled, uninhibited, wanting more and more and more….”

“Perhaps the real posterchild of terrorism is the hyper-commodified, increasingly cosmeticized American self.”

There’s a lot more in the issue, most of it quite thought provoking. All of it is anti-consumerism to the extreme, which is reasonable and makes me hate myself more for buying that Kenneth Cole shirt last week. But oh well, the chicks will dig it. All things in moderation, I say.

Except alcohol. Luckily I only got drunk once this weekend, and not even THAT drunk, just enough to have a mild hangover on Saturday. I suppose I’m still celebrating being done with my second year of residency as carried over from the previous weekend. A few more weekends of this sort of “significant” drinking, though, and I may stumble onto a problem.

And that was my Friday. Pete and Jeff (other friend from work) rolled up to “the city” and we went out to dinner and a few bars. It was fun – my neighborhood is very alive on weekends, sort of the gay/gothic/chic trendy neighborhood – I guess like a mini-Castro but quite unique.

Saturday and Sunday I spent finalizing little tweaks on my place and it is nearly complete – all that is left to be done is for me to hang up a few more pictures and then a side project or two (I would like to buy a new dresser). I really need to post up some pics of the place, and hopefully I’ll get to do that soon.

Saturday night I went and saw “Anchorman” with Gwen. I wasn’t expecting much, but was pleasantly surprised. I won’t give it a full review (and it hardly merits one), but one should note that Will Ferrell is a funny man and can carry a movie, even one as ridiculous and random as “Anchorman”. I laughed and smiled more or less throughout – good stuff, including a hilarious fight scene and bears doing stuff. In conclusion, I, for one, will take “two tickets to the gun show” anytime, anywhere.

The remainder of Sunday I spent transferring old files (mostly MP3’s, videos, and text files [but NOT porn]) from my old computer to my new computer. Now I have a fully organized MP3 library on my new compute. I also said goodbye to the old compute. I deleted almost all the non-essential programs and am preparing to donate it to good will. It hurt, a little, to get rid of the old Quake and Counterstrike, but there it is. The times, they are a changing, somebody once said. Today, I augmented my technofile geek status by purchasing a portable MP3 player, mostly to use when I work out.

At work

I’m doing a cardiology elective this month. Essentially I’m doing a rotation full of cardiology procedures, to include mainly cardiac catheterizations and echocardiograms; all of this is to see if I want to do a fellowship in cardiology. The stuff is really cool (I mean hell, Dr. Dave can tell you that). Today, for example, I put a catheter (a small tube) directly into a man’s coronary arteries (via way of his femoral artery – meaning I stuck his skin with a needle near his groin – feel your pulse between your pelvis and thigh on the right side if you want to know the actual site where the needle hit his skin) under fluoroscopy (real time X-ray) and injected radio-opaque contrast dye to view blockages in his coronary circulation. Then, I watched my staff doctor go after the lesions with balloons (i.e. angioplasty) and other devices such as stents. There’s all sorts of fluid dynamics going in there (for example, we measured pressure gradients from one part of the artery [the proximal portion] to other parts [the more distal portions] to see if the atherosclerotic lesions were hemodynamically significant or not. Was that last sentence nerdy enough for you?). Anyway, I really like this stuff – it is very TANGIBLE medicine, akin to plumbing. You see a blockage, you fix it. Kind of cool. Here are some pics of angiography:

Entry Site
Schematic one
Ignore the Red Circle

A little about echocardiograms


The consideration of fellowship, once again, becomes important, in that it appears that unless I apply for (and get) a fellowship this year, I will more or less have a 95% chance of going to Iraq in the next 2 years. (Yes, this is an increase). The downside of fellowship (again), is that it extends my overall military commitment. And we ALL know how much I love being in the military and don’t regret signing my life away to stay debt free. No really, we all know that.

So, big decisions ahead. More in the future. But I enjoy what I’m doing at work right now. There’s no call and no weekends for the month, and things are generally good. The calm before the storm, at least. J