NAVLE!

It's official- I've passed the national boards!! It's all downhill from here 'til graduation!

I can has a book deal?

Well, not quite, but Winnie is going to be published! The offshoot of the cat-centric "I can has cheezburger" blog, the dog focused "I has a hotdog" is publishing a book of their best lol dogs, and Winnie is in there with the photo above! The book is scheduled for an April 20th release date.

Congratulations to Winnie for being the best wave Nomer I know! And to Megan for making the caption. And possibly to me for taking the photo (I'll have to check that though)

The Third & The Seventh

Alex Roman. He made this 12 minute film, and called it "The Third & the Seventh" and blew my mind. I would highly recommend going to Vimeo and watching this HD and full screen.

And just remember, this is 100% computer graphics. CGI. Not real.

The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

Surgery Rotation

To give everyone a feeling of Megan's schedule durning this Surgery rotation, I have made up a list roughly detailing her day today as I understand it:

4:30 AM - Wake up
6:00 AM - Arrive at school

Patient Care
Surgery
Write up
Surgery
Patient Care
Lunch
Surgery
Surgery
Write up
Write up
Patient Care
Dinner
Surgery
Surgery
Write up
Patient Care

11:45 PM - Arrive at home.
12:00 AM - Sleep.

14 days of this. Phew.

Please Pass Healthcare Reform

Heathcare reform in the Senate passed a major, and perhaps the largest remaining hurdle late last night with a 60 vote filibuster-busting vote. I think this is great news, and it means we might have a signed bill by the end of the week.

But recently with the demise of the public option or medicare buy-in the Left has now split in half with people like Keith Oberman and Howard Dean et. all. sounding like Health care reform was only about the public option the whole time, and that this will be a "bail out" to the insurance companies. Never mind that this bill is more liberal than Dean's own plan than he ran on in 2003-04! And if the deal with the devil means increasing insurance companies profits by 1% a year for the next 10 years to insure 10's of Millions of Americans, well count me in.

So this isn't a "perfect" bill, but the history of our modern social programs is an ugly one. Social Security excluded agricultural labor, temporary workers, domestic service, government employees, and many teachers, nurses, hospital employees, librarians, and social workers (also known as women, minorities and the poor) when it was enacted in 1935. Very progressive. This healthcare bill will get us an exchange, with required transparency, subsides for those who can not afford it, much tighter regulations, and price controls. I will let Ezra Klein add to that. Further, it creates a framework for a government run national option to be inserted into the exchanges later on, which is worth fighting for.

And if this fails in 2009 we will have the exact same healthcare system I thought we all hated for another 20 years. It happened in 1975, it happened in 1992, and it would certainly happen this time. Democrats are going to loose seats in 2012. There will be more Joe Lieberman's, and there are currently lots of Joe Lieberman's in our highly dysfunctional "60 vote" Senate already! Obama won't be president forever, and odds are his successor with be a Republican. Meanwhile the Insurance industry will continue to live happily unregulated, and America's health care system will continue to become more and more expensive and inaccessible.

The death of this bill would be tragic. People need healthcare in this country, and the current system is literally killing us.



EDIT: And speaking of money, here are some estimated costs for insurance, and total risk for families, under the current system compared the the new bill. And this ignores those who today would be denied coverage, whos risk goes until bankruptcy.

my current externship

It's Christmas time!

A view from our perch.



I have been humming this song by Sufjan Stevens all day. Here is someone's homemade music video for it:



If that gets taken down, there is always lala:

Hey Guys! It's Christmas Time!...

Busy busy

I've fallen behind in my rotation updates again, but I promise I'll post about blocks 14 (avian and exotics externship), 15 (my third Internal Medicine rotation), and 16 (radiology) soon! For now, I'm putting the finishing touches on my application for an internship and starting my last-minute cramming for boards. I feel pretty confident about small animal and exotic medicine questions, but pig diarrhea, equine colic, anything about poultry, and epidemiology are all still fuzzy. Study study study!

Poor Winnie wants to know when I'll have time to play again...