Mexico Medical Student |

First of all, my heart goes out to all the victims of all kinds from all areas affected by Hurricane Katrina. I urge all of my readers–what few you are *cricket* *cricket*–to donate to the American Red Cross or the charity/relief agency of your choice to help.

I am proud to be a Texan and Houstonian, as all of the stranded Superdome refugees are being transported via hundreds of buses (FEMA is going to figure out how to clear the path, I suppose) to the Astrodome in Houston. Ever since Reliant Stadium opened, dwarfing the Astrodome, we have been wondering what to do about the 8th Wonder of the World that housed greats like Nolan Ryan and Earl Campbell. Political infighting has led nowhere, but that’s a good thing now, since the ‘Dome can be put to so much better use in this time of need than any of the other proposed ideas (including complete demolition).

As a fellow Texan, I’m also pissed at President Bush for being so “absent” during this crisis. His homage to the damage: cutting his vacation short by a few days, but not before spending a couple more days in Crawford, Texas first. The administration says that Crawford is as capable as the White House in terms of communication, but not only do I not believe it (you can’t just send a runner up the Hill to drag a senator to the West Wing), but what kind of message does that send to the country? It’s disgusting, as is the delayed deployment of military/national guard troops to provide security to this area. This was quoted today from CNN:

The president decided he should be in the nation’s capital given the magnitude of destruction and death caused by Katrina, one of the most severe storms to ever hit the United States.

You think? I know you’re slow, W, but you could have arrived at this decision, um…Monday evening or Tuesday morning. Not once has he scheduled a news conference, but perhaps he’s waiting until he goes back to DC. I want to see soldiers–our men and women of the US Armed Services–protecting our own citizens for a change. Yes, naval vessels are rightly being deployed from Norfolk, the Army Corps of Engineers is working on the levee situation, so I know that military assistance is not being ignored, but the vast majority of search, rescue and security has been left up to first responders who were overwhelmed from the beginning. This is “Homeland Security” at its worst, becoming an even larger bureaucratic behemoth slowing down Job#1: protecting our own here at home.

I have been elected by my fellow incoming students to be their representative for the American Medical Students Organization for the upcoming year. Thank you for your support, and I promise to do the best job I can! Now, if you haven’t joined, go join!

As I see the footage and satellite images of the massive storm heading for the Louisiana/Mississippi coast, I am left with a sense of foreboding of what is to come. I have lived through several hurricanes growing up on the south Texas Gulf coast, but never one as big and direct as this for those in LA and MI. In fact, a hurricane delayed our move to Mexico (and caused much more damage to our sanity than to our property), but yeesh…hell hath no fury…

Oddly enough, I had just gotten to read a fellow med student blogger this last week who is going to Tulane. He hightailed it out of there the other day. I hope he and so many others made it safe and that the damage isn’t as bad as what’s being projected. I just can’t see how when the city is already underwater if it weren’t for a levee system that is going to be overwhelmed many times over by the storm surge. Godspeed, Niels.

Sat image of the LA coast, courtesy of Google Maps. I hope the change isn’t too drastic from this.

Apple won PC Magazine’s Annual Reader Satisfaction Survey with the highest scores in both desktop and notebook computers. No exceptions–simply blew away all the competition on every item. What does victory in all this subjective ranking do for me? Nothing. But I’m happy about it anyway!
On an opposite note, Microsoft is apparently shamelessly copying MacOS yet again. Transparency? “Aero” vs. “Aqua”? C’mon…even the frickin’ search symbol Vista is using looks like the spotlight icon, just tilted the other way! (no, Apple does not have a patent on a magnifying glass metaphor for searching, but any child can see there wasn’t an attempt to change the look of Apple’s trademark icon). Typical Microsoft.

I wasn’t a TiVo early adopter, but I definitely was the first in my circle to get it. TiVo is one of those handful of products one comes across that forever changes the way you use or look at something. I can never fathom living a life of mindless channel surfing without knowing what it is I’m seeing ever again. Before moving to Mexico, I knew there was no TiVo service proper, but I had read a few pages here and there about fixing it to be useful, perhaps downlading the relevant .xml files from some free source given that there aren’t that many cable/sat providers in Mexico.

I was wrong.

There is no TV feed to download from anywhere. My TiVo is simply a 30-minute digital video buffer with which I can pause/move live TV a little. Down but not out, I decide to shell out the few pesos extra to get a digital box and basic digital service so at least I can use a guide to see what’s coming on. Big useless mistake. Not only does the guide have the wrong data so many times, but the programming is all in Spanish, even for the movies that are in English! So while it’s a pain in the ass to constantly translate a movie like Arma Mortal II (”Lethal Weapon II”), it’s at least doable. What is impossible to do is backtranslate movies for which the title has been changed completely, such as ¿Quien puede matar un niño? for “Island of the Damned.” (literal transaltion: “Who could kill a child?”) Pouring lime juice and salt on this gaping wound, we don’t have the same HBO the rest of the world apparently does. Apparently this weekend starts Rome which I was looking forward to seeing. Is it showing here? Nope. Come to think of it, I’ve never seen even a repeat of “The Sopranos,” “Six Feet Under,” or many other HBO goodies. Looking at the “HBO Latino” home page, it shows programming we don’t have. We aren’t even good enough for the “Latino” version of US HBO/MAX. We get some kind of leftover scraps like “Jumanji” and “The Mask” that the US wouldn’t even want at 3:00AM. I’m sorry, that last title should be La Máscara.

Most importantly, I have been robbed of quality study breaks. I am not an idle TV watcher, not only because it’s usually boring, but because I have a tendency to get sucked in via inertia if I sit there and do nothing. I like waiting until I can see something in peace in my own time. Not having any idea what’s coming next (except excruciatingly looking through each channel, one by one, in the future) is enfuriating. I didn’t upgrade my TiVo to 120+ hours to have it sit there and be a digital paperweight!

How I ironic that when I first got here I was excited because I saw two full-length classical programs in the same weekend! I guess I met my quota for the year.

Ok, this is one I had to read twice to make sure I didn’t miss something…a doctor is being reviewed by his state medical board and the attorney general as a follow-up to a complaint a patient filed claiming the doctor went way beyond his ethical boundaries by telling her she had to lose weight. He did more than that, of course; other sources report that it wasn’t just the possible clinical co-morbidities (hypertension, diabetes, etc.) he told her, but potential social consequences with respect to dating among older men. Allegedly, he went that far because the patient did not ever seem to respond to lesser means to get her to acknowledge she had a problem. This was an established patient, not someone blindsided on the first visit.

I’m overweight. It’s frustrating to hear a doctor say, “Have you thought about losing weight?” because saying that to an life-long overweight person or someone who’s more than just a little puffy is asking the obvious. It’s not that we haven’t thought of it; it’s just that we haven’t been consistently successful. Any fool-ass doctor should know that obesity is a multifactorial condition, involving any combination of psychology, genetics/biology, environment, etc. and that any solution needs to be equally multi-pronged. It’s not just about going to Weight Watchers. Any review of this doctor’s behavior will be as subjective as his own opinions, but it seems clear short of his being overtly judgmental or hostile, (”How can you stand to be so fat?”) or worse yet, making baseless medical claims, (”You aren’t going to see your 50th birthday”) that he was acting in the best interest of the patient’s health. The fact that the attorney general is involved is beyond ludicrous.

Insurance preferences aside, you can see any doctor you want. If you don’t like your doctor or what s/he has to say, go to another one! If a doctor can’t tell you that you should consider reducing weight or quitting smoking, etc. then who can? Personally, I think the doctor, although somewhat of an ass, is right, although his data seems a bit off. Heh.

Claudia found an article in the paper that made reference to a drug called tonzol. Not knowing what it was I looked it up but found nothing. A Mexican Google search revealed the following:

Los niños de la calle de Guadalajara tienen acceso a diversos productos tóxicos: tonzol, piedras, cemento, mariguana, cocaína. El principal es el tonzol porque es el más económico y el más accesible. Se trata de una mezcla de solventes, pegamento de PVC, gasolina blanca, thiner y vainilla. Los usuarios revuelven todos los ingredientes y con el producto resultante bañan una estopa, un trapo o un un papel y lo inhalan.

So basically it’s a cheap mix of solvents, PVC glue, gasoline, paint thinner and vanilla!! So delicate, so fresh…nothing like vanilla to soften the harsh notes of gasoline and quell the astringent vapors of PVC glue. Good God.

It makes one wonder, “This is what got to market. What the hell didn’t make it!?” I’d be surprised if any one person lived to “perfect” this formula over time. Maybe that’s what Huffer Man was doing…

This article is hilarious!

Ok, I haven’t written anything because I’ve been overwhelmed with the deluge of information being thrown at us every day, particularly in anatomy. I feel like I leave, putting on a raincoat and walk to school so that I can get blasted with a firehose of information. I know it can be done–nothing about this class is really hard (so far)–it’s just a massive amount of memorization and correlation. I’ve never been good at that. I wouldn’t say I’m sailing through my other courses, but they aren’t presenting any special problems. It’s just that we have to be in class, lab or clinics 7-8 hours per day, every day, so where does studying come in if you even want to have time to catch your breath? I get home at 5pm, and there needs to be a conservative 4-5 hours of studying unless you get behind.

I’m not used to being so out of control of my time and energy, and it’s a disconcerting feeling. I’m sure I’ll get used to it, but it’s scary, especially considering it gets worse (on the average) from here. I used to bitch about work all the time but that was a paradise compared to now. At least I’m moving forward with my life rather than working for a stagnant bureaucracy that goes nowhere or a lifeless company, sucking the life out of you. I’ll adjust.

We had an interesting show today in downtown Guadalajara. We have been futilely trying to find a 220V transformer to change our apartment’s 110V electricity for our electric washer/dryer. Like stupid Americans, we thought when a laundry room is available, it has the funky plugs or at the very least, can be retrofitted with them easily. Wrong. We have 20A for the whole apartment, so the A/C microwave and toaster all going together with the normal lights and appliances (such as the kitchen fridge) trips our single breaker.

So we went to the place where we’ve consistently been told we can find such things–El Centro. Following the map based on the street corner to find this place, it was clear that navigating the backstreets of downtown was like getting your toenails pulled by a rusty pair of pliers. You are driving along streets that used to be for horse carriages (in fact, you pass them along the way) and two buses literally vie for street space where one barely fits.

I stopped at a corner to walk to the destination with Claudia waiting in the truck, and of course, they don’t have it. Upon returning some 5 minutes later, she’s freaking out when I get in saying “Look! Look at that guy!”
“What guy?”
“That guy!” she points to a barely conscious guy ambling towards our truck, eyes glazed. “He was huffing and fighting over a rag with this hooker!”
“No f**ing way,” I said. At that point, he produced a rag, poured liquid out of a soda can, and began huffing, even sucking the solvent (or whatever it was) out of the rag. No sooner than I could think, “Crap! Where’s my vidcam!” the police came (a vidcam would be bad at this point). He started moving towards us, probably thinking I’ll shield him or “legitimize” him somehow. The cop came, grabbed him, pulled him over to the dumpster that was obviously his home (or storage warehouse) and started cuffing him. In the process of cuffing him, his pants started falling, revealing the fact he had no underwear (probably was the rag he was using).

A woman in high heels came to start talking to the cop, and I asked excitedly, “Was that the hooker?!” No, it was the woman who evidently called the cops on freballin’ huffer man. I guess he took the last of her paint thinner.