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Summer of Love, Stiffies and Waterlillies ….

Tis the summer and we are all in heat, this while providing endless hours of entertainment for you and other/better/far more attractive half who-ever he or she may be, will provide most health care workers with an incessant headache and very little sleep. The problems sex brings just about start at STDs (which bar HIV and hepatitis, are actually quite easy to treat) and end with a myriad of fractures (yes, penile fractures do exist, it’s the shaft that breaks but there’s no actual bone involved), impacted foreign bodies and tangled limbs which often result in a rather awkward visit to your favorite local casualty.

It’s strange how clumsy people can be when they try to do things themselves. I can hardly keep track of the number of 16 year olds who come in to have their hymens checked, their testicles examined (they tend to get them twisted, which cuts of their blood supply and causes incredible agony) or complaining from rug burns, keloids (yes, keloids), scars and bruises on their stiffies and water lillies, all because they can’t get a hold of them selves (literally).

Getting some one to lend a hand or an orifice doesn’t help either; first timers tend to end up with teeth marks (yes, they do leave a scar) and hickeys (both of which aren’t exactly the kind of things you’d want to peer at in the shower).

And then there are the pioneers(=retards who have a bagpipe fetish) ……

How many professionals (=porn stars) have you seen blowing air into some-one vagina when they’re going down on them?

Have you ever wondered why they never do that?

It’s because ever since the 1930′s people have known that if you blow air up some-ones hoo hoo it has to go somewhere, usually the brain, abdomen or lungs leading to a stroke, pulmonary embolism (clot in the lung) or severe abdominal pain.

Then there’s recto-anal stimulation. I’ve come to expect everything from brooms, to cucumbers, to deodorants and even beads to come marching up to casualty sandwiched between 2 pale bum cheeks. These while presumed safe when the person “wasn’t really thinking” may cause rectal tearing, anal fissuring and of-course excruciating pain both on the way in and out. The trick in these cases (as with most things) is to take it slow, start small and know exactly what you are doing.

The excuses people usually give are either I was asleep when it happened, I fell on it by mistake or that they were trying to stick their hemorrhoids back in (yes; they were trying to stick their hemorrhoids back in….). The patients usually come with an accomplice who tries to remain silent and may carry a guilty look followed by sheer horror once the x-rays/ CTs are done and a subsequent sigh of relief once the object is recovered/delivered (and yes you do get to keep it; the mystic ass box from TV doesn’t really exist; if it did it would be more like a giant U-haul than a box)*

Well at least people still haven’t heard of rectal rodents yet …. that’ll probably lead to a rabies epidemic all across the damn country.

So the next time you and your partner decide to do the nasty make sure you that you have as much fun as you can and actually know what your doing (it’s what the internet was made for people !)

* well maybe not a u-haul but it would definitely be a big ass box….

Insert Lefty Tactics Here [John McCain Search Engine Optimization]

An interesing idea by Chris Bowers of Open Left who is trying to make sure that people get the right info about Republican candidate John McCain by trying to encourage bloggers to post links where ever they can. I’m doing my part and so should you ……

1 – John McCain – Votes to Filibuster Minimum Wage Hike:

2 – John McCain – Housing Policy Shaped by Lobbyist:

3 – John McCain – Social Security:

4 – John McCain – Blasts Obama’s and Clinton’s attacks on NAFTA:

5 – John McCain – Would Be ‘Fine To Keep Troops in Iraq for ‘A Hundred Years’:

6 – John McCain – Bush is Right to Veto Kids Health Insurance Expansion:

7 – John McCain – Senate Passes Expanded GI Bill Despite Bush, McCain Opposition:

8 – John McCain – Says Overturn the Law that Legalized Abortion:

9 – John McCain – Defends Bush’s Iraq Strategy:

Here’s how you can help……. 

 

I doubt that this will be half as popular as the “tag wars” that have been all the rage lately…..

(p.s. I have a real article on the back burner but I want to try this out first)

Let this post not be a debate over politics….. please….

Fucked up Medical Facts

Here it goes:

 

  • The brain has no pain receptors, when you have a headache it’s the changes in pressure inside the skull that you are feeling rather than “true” pain. (well at least that’s what I was taught in med school … I find it hard to believe TBH, a headache is a headache because there’s pain involved.)

 

  • In addition to fingerprints we are also born with unique tongue prints (i.e. no two tongues are alike).

 

  • Your feet produce about a pint of sweat per day; you filthy animal you ……

 

  • Carbon monoxide poisoning takes about 15 minutes to kill you. This is because it has to bind to a fair share of your hemoglobin and has to get across the lungs to do it. Limited rates of movement (diffusion) across the lungs is where the bottle neck is at.

 

  • Sleep deprivation will kill you in 10 days. Most people go into seizures by day 4 of complete sleep deprivation.

 

  • At one point infecting a person with malaria was considered an option in the treatment/control of HIV.

 

  • Contrary to popular belief our hair will grow after a course of chemo, it may just be a different color and texture.

 

    Apologies as there’s very little to write about these days

Another Excellent week…..

Well for some of use at least.

From the establishment of management/treatment protocols for clubbers and ravers in England who may have had too much to drink or perhaps the wrong set of pills (yes we do have them in Kuwait as well) to the development of new ways to stop malaria dead in its tracks which will undoubtedly prevent thousands of deaths in developing countries; this week has been an exciting week for medics all around the world.

We’ve (by we I mean people in the Netherlands who I’ve never heard of) even managed to come up with new ways to look at individual arteries in the heart using ultrasound (think of it as a nano radar) so that our coronaries can be monitored more accurately than ever before and in real time and heart attacks can be diagnosed and treated in minutes rather than hours or even days…..

Even scientists in Australia have taken time off from surfing (the lucky bastards) and managed to devote countless hours (not to mention millions in R & D costs) to the development of “living” pour on (liquid) condoms that could prevent the spread of AIDS (or at least lower your chances of getting it).

Which brings me to our contribution to the fight against disease; the political equivalent of a flame war over a bunch of health-care workers having fun on their time off.

Great ….. just great ….

While others are dedicating their time and money to finding out if sunlight is to blame for type I diabetes.(An endeavor which should be a priority for our boys/girls since diabetes is practically endemic in this country.) We’re spending countless man hours chasing after people for reasons/actions that have no effect* on the standard of care their patients receive. (Legality and morality aside; the ministry should have more important priorities).

Oh well I guess it’s one more reason why health-care is so damn good in this country……………

* Apologies; I never learned when to use effect and when to use affect……

Medical Slang II

Apologies, this week has been too fucked up to write about, so here is part 2 of this post. I tried to use the first one (hat trick) a number of times but no one seems to get it……..

Hat Trick:Patient with three tubes in him, one in his pee pee (for urine) one in his nose (to drain fluid from his stomach) and one in his vein. Usually as part of trauma management; rarely done with any effeciency in this country.

Hi Fives: HIV Positive Patients

NARS: Not Another Rocket Scientist (usually a dumb newb)

OFIG: One foot in the Grave

P4P: Penicillin 4 a Prick (antibiotics for an STD)

PEP : Pharmaceutically Enhanced Personality: High or Stoned

PITA: Pain in the ass

RBG: Recieved by God

Roach, Road Pizza, Road Chilli, Toasted Goomer: A patient who barely survives after a massive usually crushing trauma.

Silver Goose/Silver Stallion: procotscope/ass camera.

TARFU: Things are Really fucked Up.

Secret Handshake: Rectal Exam

SBI: Something Bad inside = CANCER !!!!!

HBC: hit by Car

Teriyaki special: A really bad infection of the skin. Usually producing a texture similar to teriyaki beef/chicken (necrotising faciatis)

Blamestorming: Trying to find a scapegoat for the unit/teams fuck-up.

Pumpikin Positive: A dumb patient (with a hollow head)

Disco biscuits: Idiots who have taken ecstasy without drinking water and have ended up coming in because of dehydration.

TTFO: Told to fuck off (imsarif il mareeth) – an art form in and of itself… believe me.

Jack Bauer: A doctor who has been up and running for 24 hours.

Kaiser Soze: A disappearing Colleague = slacker.

P.S. A shout out to demon who has been missed over the last number of posts.

Schools Out for Summer ……….

Well not quite yet …….

It’s finally exam season, parents looking forward to trips to London, France, Spain and the U.S. and kids faking headaches, stomach aches and ending up with appendectomies they don’t need (hey look on the bright side kids; you’ll get two weeks sick leave as well as nice little scar on the right side of you belly).

So with scoring coffee being such a hassle these days and cocaine being so hard to get here in Kuwait, our future doctors, lawyers, CEOs, rocket scientists (and let’s face it, terrorists) are going to have to look for other drugs to get them through the night. And while I could go on and on about how people should study all year ’round I’m one of those people who disagrees with that idea.I think that you should spend time on subjects that interest you (for me it was OBGYN; but whatever floats yer boat) and I see nothing wrong with trying to cram the rest 12 hours before the exam. (We’ve all done it ye hypocrites….)

The drug that seems to be on everyones lips is Ritalin (some amphetamine). I doubt that half the people (even those on Desperate Housewives) who have touted/talked/bragged about Ritalin have actually used it. Retalin upregulates certain pathways in the brain. It makes certain thought processes more intense, increases concentration and induces systemic responses such as tachycardia but does not increase your IQ or your capacity to function mentally (i.e. it increases your acceleration not the speed) so it makes more sense to use it as a party drug at the shaleh rather than a study aid 2 minutes before your exam, and lets not forget the 36 side effects, adverse effects and reactions (yes I do know them all by heart) Show ▼

But not to worry kids; recent advances have allowed scientists to design a drug that allows you to upregulate most of your neural activity with a significant increase in concentration (in other words they designed anabolic steroids for the brain) and (to a limited extent) IQ. The drug is known as Provigil (Modafinil) and is available in tablet form; it was originally developed to help people with narcolepsy stay awake, was then marketed as an anti-jetlag drug and once they found out it was just as good as cocaine they decided to try it out on dumb people and found out it makes the dumb ones smarter without making the smart ones dumber. The only problem is that no one is quite sure how it works ………

Oh well have a good summer regardless of whether you pass or fail

(and no I don’t know where you can get it in Kuwait)

Killing me with your Suicide

One of the inevitable admissions during any given call will be a suicide; most people have a good reason for it (or at least they think they do) but they end up fucking it up in one way or another and manage to make it to hospital.

The problem is that because they very rarely get it right they end up waking people (namely me) up at four in the morning after spending the whole day dealing with road traffic accidents, 16 year olds with headaches and 35 year olds wanting 3 day weekends

The main mistakes people make when attempting suicide are related to a lack of understanding of the medical concepts underlying their chosen method.

For example I don’t think that people know that when they slash their wrists the should be aiming for arteries that are pretty darn deep (they are in fact closer to the bone than the skin) and they usually end up cutting into a vien and tearing through a couple of nerves causing paralysis and numbness across their hands which is probably going to be there for the rest of their lives and won’t have any effect on their life expectancy in the short term.

Another thing is that people don’t seem to know that panadol will kill you in a very slow and painful manner. If you take a panadol/paracetamol overdose you WILL get acute liver failure which is largely permanent. This results in a slow often painful death (which is not exactly what the person committing suicide was intending) as your body gets more and more jaundiced and the signs of liver failure begin to manifest.

People even manage to get hanging wrong; there are two ways people can die from a hanging (self inflicted or otherwise):

  • either by smacking the first two vertebrae in your neck against each other resulting in a hangmans fracture (which is when part of your second vertebra breaks off and embeds in your spine causing paraplegia and instant death)
  • or (as in most cases) they end up inducing a far slower and more painful death through asphyxia (cutting off the blood supply to the brain) which may take 40 minutes to an hour. (yes, I know everybody says the brain only survives for 3-5 minutes without oxygen but what they mean is that permanent brain damage starts after 3-5 minutes).

So the next time somebody thinks of committing suicide please bear in mind the following:

  • You probably won’t get it right and will have to live with the permanent damage you have inflicted on your self.
  • The doctor who is coming so treat you will have a splitting headache, be tired, bitter and will have very little sympathy.
  • It will take 24 hours to get a psychiatrist to see you (this is the Ministry of Health afterall)
  • Suicide is never the answer. Please consult a psychiatrist (preferably a good one) as soon as you can. Believe it does help and tends to put things into perspective and will hopefully stop you from making a mistake that everyone will regret.

P.S. kudos to the l33t h4x0r who tried to get my password hash last week

Superhero Medicine

I went to see the Ironman movie the other day (which was awesome BTW) and it got me thinking about how/if superpowers could be explained medically. Both Batman and Iron man were easy; they (literally) paid their dues, but some of the others are just as feasible (well in theory at least)

Lets start off the the hulk; I’m going to avoid the whole transformation part which I’m just not smart/educated enough to find an explanation for and will concentrate on the super human strength and why he turns green when angry:

  • The superhuman strength is easy, he just has an over-active hormonal axis which leads to high levels of adrenaline, testosterone and growth hormone which gives him an increase in muscle mass (at the expense of his fertility which explains why there is no Hulk junior.)
  • The green skin color comes from the effects of gamma rays on his skin cells which produce biochromes rather than melanin and have become chromatophores (cells which can change color) allowing him to change his color where he feels angry/threatened, similar to various aquatic animals.muscle biochrom
Biochrom shining yellow as a muscle is activated.

Next up we have the man without fear; Daredevil. His ability to see sound is similar to that of a dolphin:

  • Dolphins can tell how far an object is by the amount of time it takes for sound waves to reflect back off it.
  • They can detect it’s speed by alterations in the pitch of the emitted sound wave (via the Doppler effect)
  • And the nature/consistency of an object by how it distorts a given sound wave.

Show ▼

The areas of the brain used by dolphins to interpret sound waves are infact found in the human brain; but are largely under developed (probably due to lack of use); In Matthew Murdocks case (largely thanks to a hefty dose of radioactive boo ha ha as child) they’ve been made active and not only give him the ability to see sound but also to detect lies by hearing a persons heart beat.

Lastly, there’s spidermans wall climbing antics and they’re the easiest to explain. Spiders stick to walls using globs of silk secreted by special glands, there’s no reason why the radioactive spider can’t modify a persons DNA at just the right point and allow his sweat glands to do the exact same thing. Hey, if it can happen to a goat there’s no reason why it can’t be done on humans, any volunteers?

P.S. Apologies to all the Hulk fans out there, I was just kidding. Besides there’s no way I could sully Bruce Banners name worse than Ang Lee did last year.

Medical Slang

Learn the lingo kids:

404 error: missing file/document/CAT scan etc

Goomer/ C&Ts/Cabbages and turnips: Comatosed patients

Rear Admiral: Procotolgist, ass doctor,

ALP (ACUTE LEAD POISONING) Gun Shot Wound

Ass Grapes: Hemorriods, the kind that tend to hang out.

C in C (Crack in Crack): Anal Fissure (more on that later)

Bordeux: Blood stained Urine

AGMI: Ain’t Gonna Make it

AHF: Acute Hissy Fit

HYS: Hystrical

APTFRAN: Apply pillow to face, repeat as needed.

ATS: Acute thespian syndrome (faking it)

B-52: 5mg Haldol + 2mg Ativan (yisda7 feel)

Baby Catcher/ Stork Whisperer: Obs and Gynea Specialist (baby/mommy doctor)

BBCs: Bumps, Bruises and Cuts.(i.e. nothing serious)

Pecker Checker: Urologists- usually specialising in STDs or STIs

Jock/QB/Blade: Surgeon

Gas man, Gas Jocky, Gaswallah: Aneasthetist

Cath Jocky: Cardiologist

BMW: Bitch Moan and Whine

Brothel Sprouts: Genital Warts

Calling Doctor Blue = I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with him

Celestial Discharge: Dead

CHAOS: Chronic Hurts All over Syndrome

Chocolate Hostage: Constipation

Cockoo= CCU= Cardiac Care Unit

Dilligaf (“dillygaf”): Do I look Like I Give a Fuck.

DPS: Droppy Penis Syndrome.

ELFs: Evil Little Fuckers= Annoying Kids

FABIANS: Felt Awful But I’m Alright Now Syndrome.

The Sad fact is that I’ve yet to use any of these terms in Kuwait …. it’ll only add to the chaos and turmoil.

Top Ten Medical blogs [2007]

1. NHS Blog Doctor

John Crippins commentry on the faltering goliath that is the NHS. A most read for any doctors in the UK

2. The Psychiatrist Blog
Dr Michelle Tempest; she provides interesting food for thought despite her Tory touting.

3) Dr Grumble

Very well written articles, updated frequently.

4) A Fortunate Man

Chronicles of a GP in England…… I didn’t like it but the site I stole this list from did.

5) Hospital Phoenix
Was very good at giving an anonymous but personal account during the MMC disaster. now dead. (the blog not the doctor).

6) Dr Rant
This is written by a team of people and is like House, MD only even better.
7) Fat Doctor
This is an American [=big,fat, married] blogging physician.
8) The Ferret Fancier
“Done some really good undercover reporting”

It’s the same article over and over and over again !!

9) The Junior Doctor
Gives a personal account of life as a junior doctor

10) Of Short White Coats and Stethoscopes
Gives a personal account of life as a medical student.

Source

Huzzah ! I now have 3 posts and 200 hits ! Life is good !