Made ya look.

It seems like aborted babies come closer and closer to my dorm room as the week progresses. I frown upon having to talk about these things, because there are strong opinions and heated arguments about it, but what obstructed my way to class obstructs my thoughts, I suppose.

What I've heard often when I pass the giant displays are "Is this for abortion? Or against?" "Is this supposed to be a pro-life protest? Or pro-choice?" I don't think it was either. It was there to force attention to an on-going issue, and being on a university campus, the display was open to universal thoughts and point of views. I appreciate both views of pro-life/choice. I think both stances are hard to argue, and I really admire the people who stick to their guns.

My rant is too long for the Free Speech Board, so here goes.

Everyone's heard about the roaring twenties, and whoop-dee-doo, there was partying, drinking, and girls started to cut their hair short. What you don't hear a lot about is the rate of pregnancies during that time. People were able to make a living off of coat hanger abortions in cheap and shady hotel rooms. Girls would get butchered or die from infections because they rather not have to care for a child they didn't mean to conceive. People do it for different reasons, and overall, it takes ignorance is bliss to its extremes. Would you rather see a child aborted, or abandoned? Is it worth bringing a child into an unnurturing home? There are stories of babies found in dumpsters; is that worse? Should a raped woman keep the resulting child and hate it throughout it's life?

And then there's the question about where does life begin. From my bioscience point of view, I believe that life begins at the cellular level. That is the essence of biology, so arguing about when does life begin is a dead conversation with a biologist. Go see a philosopher to try and find your point or read a biology textbook to see mine.

But whenever life begins, I see contradictions in the face of abortion. Just by observing the world and where it's gone, I find it novel that pro-lifers can still find abortion so egregious. If they see it as murder, why not flinch at every Sunday newspaper? Why not cringe at the evening news? I'm sure that stories of rape, homicide and suicides are still disturbing, but you don't see people bringing out their torches and pitchforks to do anything about it. Because they can't. It happens. People decide to end their spouse's life by the blade of a knife. They decide to end their own lives by the point of a gun. And surprise, surprise, we find people deciding to abort their child during pregnancy. But somehow, that's not "just another news report."

The general population still seems undecided. Around the display and Free Speech Board, there numerous "where are all the pro-lifers?" and "get the law off my body" messages. And I doubt that anyone can find a majority in such a diverse campus, let alone the nation. I guess it's unclear which side I'm on or if I even have a stance at all, but when it comes down to it, I appreciate the life and creation of a child. Scientifically, I find the growth and development of life fascinating, and truly believe that life begins even before fertilization. Socially, I think the exact same, but I've lived 2 decades, and seen what the world is. Sparing a life from the worst of it isn't so bad, is it?

Danger! Danger!

Sometimes, I think I'm filled with too much angst. I would try to calm myself, and just lay down somewhere. But then my mind starts working, and it glosses over everything that peeves me, and then I feel bad energy radiating everywhere. I frequently feel like thrashing my arms and kicking my feet, and anyone within a 3 feet radius will undoubtedly get hurt.

I lay there, and I can actually physically feel the energy build up, trickle down my arms, to my fingers, and getting ready to start the flailing. But at the moment, I tell myself stop, and it gets trapped. Instead, the energy escapes my body in the form of a few tears.

And then I get up, blog about it, and everything is back to normal.

A vicious cycle.

Petty, not pretty

I used to be the boss on the elementary school playground. I used to play basketball with the boys (before they hit puberty), kick the furthest in kickball, pound at tetherball, make them run when I sparred in Tang Su Do. So I was usually team captain when team sports came around.

We decided to play kickball one day, and my rival and I were the usual captains. I chose my closest friends first (default), and then just picked from the rest of the group. I guess in elementary school, cliques have not been something of a distinction, so everyone was friends with everyone else. Some people think they're more of a friend than you would expect, and that's when the separation begins and feelings get hurt. One of my classmates expected to be on my team, but I ended up not picking her. She was one of those friends that you would talk to in class, but not really outside the confines of the academic world. She played on the other team, and was especially set on getting me out single handedly. I thought it was almost rude because she started making bad calls and bending the rules, but it was just a game.

We didn't really talk in class anymore.

5th grade came, and I remember we actually got into a physical fight under the shade of a tree one day. I don't remember why we fought, but I remember I pulled a big ugly bug out of my hair after school because she had pushed me to the ground. We ended up hating each other over something negligible that started a year earlier.

To me, not being on the same team is just something that happens, and is nothing really personal. Too bad something so little ended a friendship. I don't know where she is, or what she's doing now, but I'm sure if we played kickball again, I'd obliterate her.

A doctor's poker face

You think doctors see it all the time. The weird things, the sad things, the things that makes the general population squirm uncomfortably. But a misconception is that seeing those things don't effect them anymore. Believe me, they will react just as a pre-med student like me would.

Like when a patient comes into the ER with a cellphone charger cord in his penis for a month. I had to read the history and brief twice. "I have to get this one, Doc," I said to the ER doctor I refer to Mr. Rogers (for similarity reasons). He picked up the clipboard and read it. "Whaaaaat? Cell phone charger in his penis??" I replied with a "yea, lets go!" He rolled his eyes and we were off to Obs. 8.

We walked into the room, and Doc introduces himself with a "so I see you have quite a problem."

A throaty smoker's lung voice replied with a "yea, I've tried to wait this out long enough." I secretly chuckled at the non-intended pun. "So tell me how this all happened"

"Well, I've passed a few kidney stones before, and about 2 weeks after Christmas, I..."

"Two weeks after Christmas? This been in you for more than a month?"

"Well yea. I was just hopin' it'd come out eventually. Well, during that time, I felt a painful stone in my tallywacky..."

"Can you tell me what a tallywacky is?"

"My penis." "Uh huh...." My cheek muscles had to fight incredibly hard to fight the urge of laughter that would undoubtedly escape if I didn't have my lips pursed. I had a suspicion that Doc Rogers did that one on purpose.

"Well I figured that if I can push the stone back into my bladder, it can reorient itself and come out a little more comfortable. So I took a cell phone charger, and stripped the wire out of it.."

"So there's no wire in there."

"Naw, I'm not that stupid." The corners of my mouth twitched. "So I got myself erect, and started to put it in. I got it to hit the stone, and it was so painful that I kinda flinched and doubled over, and then I lost the damn thing! I eventually passed the stone, but the cord is still in there."

"Let me cover you up some, and feel around....Oh...yup, it's definately in there all right...Well let's get an x-ray of that, call the urologist, and we'll see where to go from there."

The x-ray came a few minutes later, and we found that the wire somehow rolled itself into a knot in the bladder. The urologist decided that it can't just be pulled out, but he will have to go in with an incision, cut it up with a laser, and then remove it. I asked how long the recovery time would be if that was the case, and he said 6 weeks. Doc Rogers said, "yea,...he'll be pissed." And we all finally erupted into laughter.

How did people get so stupid? Ahhh, good times in medicine.

I don't think there's an app for that.

It only goes to so deep. People don't really know what true modern marvels are. You've seen the commercials for the iPhone and things. It does quite a bit of stuff, and I'm not gonna lie, I wanted one too. It's pretty cool, but the things I saw in the operating room does a lot more for human life and is incredibly more amusing, if not fascinating.

At 7am, I waited for Dr. Baptiste in the cafeteria, not really knowing what to expect for the day. About 7:30, he walks in, asks me and 2 other girls if we were hungry and then took us to the viewing room to brief us on the patient. In the office, he pulled up a woman's files on the computer, and showed us some short videos of her coronary angiogram. Even at that moment, I was amazed. I saw her beating heart on the computer screen, pumping x-ray dye through vessels that split, branched and curved into little threads across the screen. "Can anyone tell me something that's abnormal here?" Upon inspection, I saw that one part of a vessel looked "too skinny" compared to the rest of the vessel. I told Dr. Baptiste that the dye is constricted on that coronary vessel and he told us that that particular vessel was only getting 1% of it's required blood through. She had 4 others like it and it reduces her life expectancy to 80%.

I changed into deep green blue scrubs, put on a hair net and booties, and scrubbed up. When it was my turn to come into the OR, I donned my surgical mask and stepped into a jazz filled room. There were several people surrounding a table that supported a middle aged brunette woman on her back with her eyes taped shut. An assistant surgeon explained to me the various tubes and contraptions that were protruding from her chest. Several of which were connected to the heart-lung machine. A heart- lung machine! Something that takes the blood out of your body, oxangenates it , and puts it back in to your body while you can't. I think that's amazing.

I peered over the table and saw her chest being held open with a clamp, exposing the most important muscle in the human body. It was strange and mesmerizing to watch a live beating heart, and a surreal feeling washed over my own. It made me wonder what my own heart looks like, if its healthy....Dr. Baptiste had already harvested the needed vessels from her femoral and mammary veins and was about was about to begin the actual bypass.

The heart was surrounded by ice, and the potassium solution was injected by the cardiac anesthesiologist. Everything on the moniter began to slow down and flat line. After her heart was arrested, Dr. Baptiste punched out three evenly spaced holes, flinging the punched out tissue over his shoulder. With experienced, steady hands, Dr. Baptiste took a blood vessel, one at a time, and threaded it onto each hole. Every needle went into tissue with precise spacing from the last threading. A sewing machine couldn't have done it better. 3 new vessels from the aorta. Her life expectancy was now even better than the average population. 105%.

I followed him out to talk to the husband of the patient. "Everything went fine. She slowed down before we were ready at one point, but we defribbed and were back on track. It'll be a few hours before you can see her, but overall the surgery was excellent." "Thank you doctor. That's great news. Thank you girls". He thought I was part of the surgical team. I smiled.

It was an interesting feeling. I felt good after he said that. Not because he gave me nonlegitimate credit for saving his wife, but he saw me and thought I was an adult. I know in some sense I am, but I've always worried that people won't take me seriously in a world like medicine. I'm a barely 5 feet girl much too petite in size. My cousin, who is taller than me by a lot, got rejected by many patients during her residency thinking that she's just an unqualified child.

My mom and other people told me I should be a surgeon because I'm good with my hands and I did well at the sight of blood. They were impressed that I was able to eat after watching a 5 hour long surgery.

I was just impressed by the sheer and simple genius of medicine.

Therapy, I guess.

It's strange how you think you'd get more privacy as you grow up. Isn't that what teenagers scream at their parents? "You don't give me enough privacy!" It seems like privacy is scarce findings right now for me. I can't quite have a room to myself to just listen to silence. I didn't have to take a roll of toilet paper in and out every time I went to the bathroom. I can't enjoy my guilty pleasures without worrying that someone else is bored by the food channel. People say it all the time: things are simpler back then, and it's not like I didn't appreciate it "back then". I just miss it a lot now.

I've decided I'm going to blog more. It's a way for me to complain about things people wouldn't really want to hear about in real life. I'll be able to do so more often now because I get at least 3 hours of quiet to myself every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. It will be nice. Like right now, I steeped myself some lemongrass and spearmint tea, which did not turn out to taste very good. But it's okay. I enjoy the peace.

Not even the worst

"The shittiest girlfriend I've ever had."

Never been called that. A bit harsh, I'd say.
Me? A pushover? So I've heard in the past. I've tried to be assertive. Tried to push back.