parlanceofafrail

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The face of a human embryo, 5 weeks.

#science #embryology

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An ER doctor steps outside after losing a 19-year old patient. (Posted by a close friend and coworker on Facebook) (via imgur)

“…I guess I came over here to tell you how proud of you I am. Not because you did the best you could for those patients, but because after twenty years of being a doctor, when things go badly you still take it this hard. And I’ve gotta tell you, man, I mean… that’s the kind of doctor I want to be.” -JD

We are, all of us, human.

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God dammit Will!

#shakespeare #prose #English #vocabulary

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#poetry #prose #love #writing #thoughts

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I watched you stop breathing. I did CPR on you for 30 minutes. I poked you with needles and listened to your wife crying in the consultation room. I saw you take another breathe as your heart started beating again. I saw you start fighting the tubes. I saw your wife smile again. I sat with your wife while they were preparing to transfer you. I listened to stories about you.

We try so hard every day to bring people back, and when we do, we realize why we are in this business.

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Sometimes he’ll tell me about his college days, about an Afghanistan I have never known and very few people would believe ever existed. "In the College of Engineering, there was this lecture hall, with seats for 1,000 students," he says as eyes begin to get bigger. "At the end of the lecture, the seats would move. The whole auditorium would shift as you spun along the diameter. The engineering of the building itself was very interesting." He continues to describe the construction details, then sighs. "I wonder if it’s still around?" There is a pause. For 25 years I have tried to fill that silence, but I have never quite figured out what to say. I guess silence goes best there. He is the next one to speak. “You see, even your old-aged father was once part of something important.” When he says things like that I want to scream. I don’t want to believe that the years can beat away at you like that. I don’t want to know that if enough time passes, you begin to question what was real or who you are. I am unconcerned with what the world thinks of him, but it is devastating to know that he at times thinks less of himself. We are the same, but we are separated. People don’t see him in me. I wish they would. I walk in with a doctor’s white coat or a suit or my Berkeley sweatshirt and jeans. High heels or sneakers, it doesn’t matter, people always seem impressed with me. “Pediatrician, eh?” they say. “Well, good for you.” I wonder what people see when they look at him. They don’t see what I see in his smile. Perhaps they see a brown man with a thick accent; perhaps they think, another immigrant cabdriver. Or perhaps it is much worse: Maybe he is a profile-matched terrorist, aligned with some axis of evil. “Another Abd-ool f——-g foreigner,” I once heard someone say. Sometimes the worst things are not what people say to your face or what they say at all, it is the things that are assumed. I am in line at the grocery store, studying at a cafe, on a plane flying somewhere. "Her English is excellent; she must have grown up here," I hear a lady whisper. "But why on earth does she wear that thing on her head?" "Oh, that’s not her fault," someone replies. "Her father probably forces her to wear that." I am still searching for a quick, biting response to comments like that. The trouble is that things I’d like to say aren’t quick. So I say nothing. I want to take their hands and pull them home with me. Come, meet my father. Don’t look at the wrinkles; don’t look at the scars; don’t mind the hearing aid, or the thick accent. Don’t look at the world’s effect on him; look at his effect on the world. Come into my childhood and hear the lullabies, the warm hand on your shoulder on the worst of days, the silly jokes on mundane afternoons. Come meet the woman he has loved and respected his whole life; witness the confidence he has nurtured in his three daughters. Stay the night; hear his footsteps come in at midnight after a long day’s work. That sound in the middle of the night is his head bowing in prayer although he is exhausted. Granted, the wealth is gone and the legacy unknown, but look at what the bombs did not destroy. Now tell me, am I really oppressed? The question makes me want to laugh. Now tell me, is he really the oppressor? The question makes me want to cry. At times, I want to throw it all away: the education, the opportunities, the potential. I want to slip into the passenger seat of his cab and say: This is who I am. If he is going to be labeled, then give me those labels too. If you are going to look down on him, than you might as well peer down on me as well. Close this gap. Erase this line. There is no differentiation here. Of all the things I am, of all the things I could ever be, I will never be prouder than to say that I am of him. I am this cabdriver’s daughter.

A pediatrician takes pride in her Afghan cabdriver father

(via nightsinsoho)

This is beautiful and sad. The hospital I’m at is in a white-dominated area, more so than where I grew up, and it can be really hard to get through the day with the casual racism that just spills forth from patients… nurses… doctors.

Read her story. 

(via md-admissions)

#writing #racism #stereotypes

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The medical practitioner is to serve as a healer. It is sad to hear that even after being afforded the privilege to conduct a study in medicine, there are still those who would ever dare maim life. Primum non nocere.

Atul Gawande, famous US surgeon and writer, elaborates on the role of doctors in state-sanctioned torture

[x]

#AtulGawande #medicine #ethics #torture #USA

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how to perform cpr

visual.ly

#CPR #medicine

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Anything To Make Me Happy

When I was 17, I gave my heart away. I figured I didn’t have much to lose anyway. I needed to be in repair and I thought she could help me. She was simple, balanced and kind like me and I thought we might just have a chance. I gave her many compliments and she dutifully returned them. We talked about the things we would do, when  you know, there was no need to be furtive any more. She even made me a few things. A neat little article of her handicraft. She drowned it with her passions and her perfume and slipped it into my hand smiling. I’ve never felt lighter.

I grew fond of her with the months and days. She was an unusual thing but she was my unusual thing and God knows I’m not completely sane either. I was the awkward one, she always seemed to know what to do. It was not that she gave me butterflies, she just made me question my adequacy to exist, repeatedly. I remember telling her this one day, I told her she deserved more, told her that her special person could be much more than I but she politely called me an idiot and asked me to shut up. I beamed stupidly at her and she twinkled back and I wondered how such a lovely creature could be mine to dote over. I made her promise to never leave and she said she’d try. It sounded convincing enough at the time.

She made me burn and I wrote for her as I write now but with passion uninhibited. I wrote her many things, mostly poems and to each I poured a different part of my soul. They weren’t particularly good but she was impressed. Things become magnified when they’re inspired by you and she understood this for which I was grateful. She tried writing back and nearly reduced me to tears. She wasn’t particularly good either but it was a wonderful thing, to be adulated in prose.

I would tell her I loved her and she would reply in like and we would disagree about who meant it more. In this way, we had our own quarrels, unique to us, as every two special people should. Flattery didn’t work on her. She recoiled from it and it was almost like I’d hurt her although we both knew I’d never. She knew who she was and refused to acknowledge more than she deserved for her lot. That was her charm. That was how she’d won me infinite times over.

There is no good way to end these things you know. The 3 years and 54 days we pretended to be in love for were not without argument. Initially it was the tame kind. You know, things like; you talk with so and so an awful lot, you guys seem close. But with the imminent drift, the chemistry that was never there in the first place began to dissipate. The distance didn’t help. I remember this once, she wrote me a letter. It accused me of many things. Between the lines: of not writing back. But in the text, many other things. Most were hurtful and untrue. But at the time I only thought it endearing.

We were never in parity. There was little in common. We read different genres, listened to different genres and differed in this manner in many regards. I had no worth of self and she was, if you will trust me and I promise this isn’t with exaggeration, perfect. I know now that we were never about love. You simply came to need me. I wish I didn’t need you back.

#writing #prose

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Frontal Sinus and Nasal Duct

While adults with sinus problems are all too familiar with the frontal sinuses, they’re not structures that we’re born with!

The maxillary and ethmoid sinuses are present from birth, but the sphenoid and frontal sinuses only form after the frontal bone begins to ossify (“turn to bone” - when we’re born it’s largely tough membrane, to allow passage through the birth canal), around age 2.

The frontal sinuses are largely formed by age 9, but don’t reach their full size until puberty. When fully formed, they are part of the primary immune defenses, producing mucous to trap germs and filter air from the nose.

Interestingly, over 5% of people don’t form frontal sinuses. The absence of frontal sinuses does not appear to present significant hindrance to the immune abilities of the body. However, chronically dry nose is a frequent side-effect.

Atlas of Applied Topographical Human Anatomy for Students and Practitioners. Translated to English by J. Howell Evans, 1906.

#Science #Medicine

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I’ve never asked. Anyone out. 

what’s with guys and their obsession of knowing about your dating past before they ask you out.. 

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For a friend

Like the blueberry bees that sip on the nectar of motley blossoms did I, in the antiquity of yore, draw from within you.

Like the babe in the woods of neverland did you, allow what should not have been to steal me of your life.

Everyday, it is with renewed vigour that I revisit the abodes of what is now just grubby memory, in hopes of finding your essence there, still wandering, forever yearning to be unearthed and displayed to the world - the Koh-i-Noor of my time.

Through your eyes I saw the world and through your ears I heard it speak.

Ours was more than an allegiance of lovers, for your face of hurt on the day of passing, frequents my mind more than the sensories of reality.

You are the shadow that moves in the storm of my miserable eyes.

You are not living but you are still alive.

It is your hand that writes to me in the post, it is your hair I smell in the summer grass, it is your name the water whispers as it ripples and flows and it is your Koh-i-Noor face that the birds flock to form, in the dying red of the sunset sky.

My archangel, you flew me to the heights of this sky, where my hair brushed against the dew of the clouds and higher even, until only the heavens of the holy sat above us.

But the higher we flew, the more you tired, until you wings stopped pumping altogether and your heart gave away with one final flutter.

And as your face of hurt turned to stone and crumbled under the unrelenting sun, your grip let loose and there I was, hurtling towards the earth, free falling through the clouds.

Even as I had lost all hope, the grains of your being wrapped around me, slowing me down until I was floating gently down, to the ground of my birth, enclosed in a bubble of stardust - that which of you were once made.

Carry me on, carry me against the tide, bear my weight and carry me home - into your grace for the last, my friend.

#writing #prose #poetry

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A Black Hole is an extraordinarily massive, improbably dense knot of spacetime that makes a living swallowing or slinging away any morsel of energy that strays too close to its dark, twisted core. Anyone fortunate (or unfortunate) enough to directly observe one of these beasts in the wild would immediately notice the way its colossal gravitational field warps all of the light from the stars and galaxies behind it, a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing.

Thanks to the power of supercomputers, a curious observer no longer has to venture into outer space to see such a sight. A team of astronomers has released their first simulated images of the lensing effects of not just one, but two black holes, trapped in orbit by each other’s gravity and ultimately doomed to merge as one.

http://www.universetoday.com/116500/new-simulation-offers-stunning-images-of-black-hole-merger/?

#space #blackhole #light

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Question marks are for the novice

As acerbic as living is, do you not find it fitting that the only immutable certainty in life is death? It is inevitable, yet seldom given the audience it deserves.

There are the scientists who distract themselves by attempting to elucidate nature and the mathematicians who find pleasure in assorting esoteric symbols. Then there is the musician- the modern bard, composing staffs to lyrics like these and the soldiers and doctors, the latter cleaning up after the former.

Ascetics devoted to meaning and non-meaning, theologians and nihilists, all to what avail. For some like me, the concept of meaning isn’t universal. Sometimes, it even frightens.

What else is religion but an outlet for this question. But why does there need to be a purpose to living at all. This is a dilettantish ideal. There is something transcendental about futility. There is something alluring about nihilism.

#writing #prose #religion #nihilism #death #life

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1956- Gordon Parks documented the everyday lives of an extended black family living in rural Alabama under Jim Crow segregation for Life magazine’s photo-essay “The Restraints: Open and Hidden.” 

#race #colour #Alabama