the dangers of being near me in class

Ever since high school, I've had a tendency to fall asleep in class. No matter how hard I try to stay awake, the moment I let my mind wander, I'm out in a flash.

Normally, this isn't a big deal. If I miss a lecture, I just learn it on my own. And it's not like I snore or anything, so I'm not bothering anyone around me. The problem, however, is that every time I fall asleep, there's the risk that I'll experience a knee-jerk reaction...you know: the jerking reaction that you experience if you wake abruptly from your sleep.

I know it sounds relatively harmless...but that's because most of you haven't seen MY knee-jerk reactions, the mother of all knee-jerk reactions. My hands flail up, my legs kick out, and my body shoots forward. Quite spectacular (or so I've been told), except for the fact that anyone near me is at risk of injury. Luckily, nothing major has happened as of yet, although I did cause one girl to hyperventilate for a couple of minutes from sheer terror.

That may change soon. Although these incidents are extremely rare, I can feel another one of them slowly creeping up. Just today, I experienced a minor 'mishap' and ended up kneeing one of my friends in the side (thank goodness her binder was there to protect her >.<). It's only a matter of time, before it's a full-blown reaction, and I claim my first casualty.

So those of you who are in my class and see me sleeping: beware!

The oh so exciting life of Snappythegrouch

My anonymous stalker asked me today if I had stopped updating my blog. The short answer is no; but the reason why I haven't been writing is that nothing interesting has been happening in my life.

Now that my exams are over and I'm on Reading Week, I've been living a very, uh, minimalist lifestyle. Essentially, I eat, watch tv, eat some more, and sleep. As you can tell, this allows for little excitement, hence my lack of updates.

I know that this sounds like a total waste of my Reading Week, but with how busy I always end up being during the school year and even the summer time, I enjoy staying at home and doing pretty much nothing. Other than spending some time designing a new website (check it out if you're really bored: www.uahsj.ualberta.ca) and reading a few books - if you're a science nerd like me, I recommend The Immortals by James Gunn - I haven't been too productive, but that's the way I wanted to spend my Reading Week. ;)

Anyways, the one time I tried being active was today during my volunteer shift at the hospital, and that turned out to be a complete flop. Although there were tons of kids at the clinic, none of them wanted to play with me. The kids must have had an Anti-Social radar on and avoided me like wildfire by crying their way out. I have never heard so much crying at once. >.<

So the gist of the message is that yes, I am still alive and kicking, but my life is just more boring than usual.

Oh, for those of you that may care, I finally finished Warcraft 3. Yay me!

There's one born every minute

The dilemma:

You have 150 flowers to sell by Valentine's Day, at $3 a piece for a fundraiser (Cystic Fibrosis). Not only are these flowers NOT roses (they're carnations), but they're not even decorated that nicely - in spite of assurances from the provider that they would be 'professionally done' - and are obviously not worth the price that they're being sold for. Selling them cheaper isn't really an option, as any less would result in no profit. What to do?

Solution #1:

Set up four girls (attractiveness not determined, as I did not meet them) at a residence to sell ~30 flowers. How they sell the flowers is up to them, as long as they sell them at the stated price.

Outcome: flowers are gone in no time! We should have given these girls more flowers.

Solution #2:

Have a guy and a girl (girl is attractive enough to get guys' attention, and has an outgoing personality) sell flowers at another site, using the girl to attract the guys and girls, with the guy attracting the occasional girl to the stand.

Outcome: they sell about 20 flowers in an hour. Pretty good!

Solution #3:

Give two guys the same stand as above. Guys approach the occasional girl, but really, have no influence in drawing other guys.

Outcome: a grand total of 0 flowers in an hour.


You can probably guess which group I was part of. >.< Thank goodness we had a lot of guy/girl combinations, because we managed to sell out in one day, when we had initially planned to sell everything over a two-day span.

But yeah, it's amazing how much influence a girl can have in swaying a guy's decision. I saw a friend of mine convince a guy to switch from an firm no to a yes in a span of 30 seconds. This is why I like to have more girls at a fundraiser than guys, because you're almost always guaranteed to get more money. I have a feeling this ties into Ladder Theory somehow, but I won't elaborate any more than that. If you don't know what Ladder Theory is, look it up! :P

(for those of you not familiar with the reference in my title, it derives from a famous quote by P.T. Barnum: "There's a sucker born every minute". Yes, I'll admit it: us guys are a bunch of suckers.)

and next to go is...

Yesterday while I was channel surfing, I was surprised to see Arrested Development showing for two hours. It turns out that Fox had decided to release the last couple of episodes, forever finishing the series. Once again, another great sitcom has come to an end.

I think it's a shame that Arrested Development never gained the ratings that it deserved. In spite of its extremely weird plot lines, it was well-written and quite funny. The series finale was true to form and did a good job tying up a lot of loose ends. That being said, how could Fox ever expect the show to achieve popularity if it kept on giving it crappy time slots and irregular scheduling? Take yesterday's showing, for instance. Considering that the other episodes have been showing on Mondays this season, how the heck did Fox decide to release these last few episodes on a Friday?!? It just boggles the mind!

The path to Arrested Development's demise resembles the current path of another one of my favourite sitcoms: Scrubs. Like Arrested Development, Scrubs suffered from horrible scheduling times last season from NBC, and only just started showing this season's episodes last month. Undoubtedly, Scrubs will face the same fate as Arrested Development at the end of this season, which is too bad, because I think the plot's becoming as funny as it was during the first season.

With the end of Scrubs approaching, what will be left in the world of comedy/sitcoms? With the broadcasting companies focusing mainly on reality TV (yawn), I have my doubts that a new Friends or Everybody Loves Raymond will appear any time soon. Although I have my good ol' cartoons to rely on (*cough* Justice League and The Batman), I fear I shall have to forsake my TV soon and find a new pasttime. =(

The importance of having insurance

Considering how crappy my last few posts have been, I was going to take a small break before posting again until I was more rested and less sick, but after I shadowed today at a breast cancer clinic, I felt it was my duty to provide you (my visitor/s) with some advice about future planning. And as you can probably guess from the title, the advice is: make sure you have good insurance; namely medical insurance to cover the stuff not covered by the government.

I know, I know, a lot of you are probably going to think that insurance is too expensive and not worth the investment, but after seeing a lady's eyes pop out after being told that she would have to foot the cost of $2300 for EACH injection of a drug, which she has to get done six times, I think it would be wise if we all at least consider purchasing insurance like Blue Cross so that we can get that sort of coverage (I use the term 'we' loosely, because I of course have insurance to cover at least some of those costs). Alternatively, we could consider throwing tomatoes at Ralph Klein until he agrees to expand health coverage, but I suspect that endeavor would fail miserably. =P

I know that I sound like some cheesy salesman, but go on out and get that insurance! Oh yeah, and don't smoke, because if you do, I'll hunt you down and make you quit. I don't want to be going to the lung cancer clinic next week, only to find you there because you didn't follow my advice!

My kingdom for a pancreas

So, before I go on with today's story, I should apologize for my last entry. From the people that I spoke to, I gather that I was a lot more negative than I had intended to be. Although my trip to Banff wasn't great, it wasn't a completely horrible experience either. Considering how little I spent to go there, I guess I got what I paid for.

Anywho, back to my story. Today will probably be the highlight of my week, as I got to listen to a talk by Dr. James Shapiro, one of the founders of the Edmonton Protocol. For those of you who have no idea what the Edmonton Protocol is, it's the islet cell transplantation technique developed at the University of Alberta for treating certain patients suffering from Type 1 diabetes.

Since I know that many of you don't share the same interest in research as me, it may be hard to fathom how popular the talk was. To put it into perspective, we scientists - I consider myself a scientist even though I'm in medicine - judge the quality of a speaker very much like how the public judges the popularity of a celebrity. In addition to the significance of the person's research, you have to consider his/her appearance, accent, etc. Dr. Shapiro had all of that...great research, charismatic appearance, and a British accent (unlike me, who, for being Asian, starts off with negative points, since we've been getting a lot of bad press lately with fudging cloning data and poor management of the Avian flu crisis). Keeping all of that in mind, it was no wonder that this talk sold out so quickly.

The seminar was everything I imagined and more. Not only was food great (the way a cheap buffet should be), but I also learned about the technical aspects of the Edmonton Protocol, including a lot of its shortcomings and areas of fine-tuning. Even accidentally sitting near an ex-supervisor couldn't ruin my excitement. Ah, what was a night to remember (sighed the science nerd).

...why I don't go to clubs (aka my 'wonderful' trip to Banff)

So, for those of you that didn't notice, I've been away the last couple of days. There was a 'relaxation conference' held for medical students over the weekend at Banff that I got conned into attending, because the students from last year assured me that it would be loads of fun. Because I'm battling a cold/cough, and I'm too lazy to write in paragraph format, here's a list of my upsides and downsides of the trip:

The positives

1. winning a booster juice bottle (I always seem to win random/useless gifts. I must own 5 or 6 water bottles by now!)
2. buying two mini jerseys from McDonald's. These jerseys were so great that I think I will end up buying the complete set, which means I will have to go to McDonald's twice a week for about a month (blech).
3. the nice weather
4. finishing my 'Superbugs' book that I started during the summer. Yes, as I've said many times, I am a nerd.
5. getting an excuse to never go to a club again (see #4 below)

The negatives

1. having to put up with drunk roommates. What is the point of calling out my name in the middle of the night to see if I got back safely, if I'm obviously sleeping?!?
2. getting flattened by a drunk(?) friend twice while in bed...my poor privates! :(
3. going to the club, since I don't like to drink or dance
4. getting puked on at the club. It's ironic that the two people that wanted to be at the club the least (my cousin and I) were the two people that managed to get in the line of fire. I actually was witness to two bouts of projectile vomiting. >.<
5. being sick and having a headache for the entire trip
6. attending REALLY boring seminars. The only decent sleep that I had over the weekend.
7. crappy buffet. How is that even possible?!? Until this trip, I would have never thought that unlimited food could be so unappealing.
8. the list goes on

You'll notice that most of the positives that I listed really have nothing to do with the seminars or my time in Banff. I'm sure that most people at the trip had fun, but I guess my idea of fun doesn't entail killing my brain cells and prancing around a dance floor to loud music. Oh well, maybe next year I won't be so cheap, and I'll go skiing. Um, if any of my classmates are reading my blog, I, uh, LOVED the Banff trip. It was so dreamy. Our med class rocks! (alright, that should distract them from all of the other negative comments in this entry; everyone else, you have my permission to gag)

I shall finish this entry here, since my brain's not really in any condition to think, and I've butchered this entry plenty already. Plus, I should do some research for my small group discussion, since I've never seen anyone look as disgusted as my facilitator did today, when we couldn't answer a single question.

(p.s. to my anonymous poet: I am starting to lose sleep trying to figure out who you are. A hint would be nice, or else I shall have to resort to something drastic, like declaring my undying love for you, irregardless of whether you're a guy or girl)

You had me at "I like cancer"

Three magical words that have won me over to Medical Oncology. Forget the fact that the job doesn't pay as well as other medical specialties. Forget the fact that out of the three patients that I saw today, two were terminally ill, and the other one will most likely become terminally ill in the next year (the success rate tends to be a lot higher at most cancer clinics, but I happened to be in a lung cancer clinic, for which few effective therapies are available. the moral of the story is don't smoke!). And forget the fact that the field is solely drug-based (I generally hate pharmacology). As soon as I asked the Medical Oncology resident why she ended up choosing this specialty and she uttered those three words, I knew I had found my raison d'être.

I still have several years left before I even enter a specialty, but after my shadowing experience today, I hope that I can get into this area. The work schedule is good, there's a lot of patient interaction, and the cases seem different enough that I don't think I'd ever get bored. There's also the opportunity to do research, which, being the nerd that I am, I would thoroughly enjoy doing alongside my clinical work. Not to mention that there seems to be a lot of room for growth in this area, as there is a huge push to find new treatments for cancer.

Now, wanting to be a medical oncologist because a resident told me that she likes cancer may seem like an odd reason to want to enter the specialty. But you have to realize that I myself am obsessed about cancer, and I myself have told people on many occasions that I like cancer. So, it was quite refreshing to hear those words coming out of someone else's mouth. Instead of having to go through the blank and disgusted looks on people's faces as I talked about my interests, here was someone who shared my passion about the topic!

I guess it goes to show that even freaks can find their own niche. =)


On another note, I don't mind if you sign my guestbook anonymously, but I would appreciate it if you gave me some hint who you are. If you're the person who wrote the Warcraft poem in my guestbook, please tell me who you are, because you are my new hero!