I’ve been non-smoker Adrian for three weeks today. You know what? It’s easy to quit, when you actually want to do it. But if you don’t find it easy, it’s well worth your time checking out this website, or if you’re in Australia, call Quitline on 131 848.
For me, this is an achievement.
Part One – Silent Sirens
It was 1995, or 1996. I was about 10 or 11 years old, and not yet interested in all things medical. When my sister fell ill to what the doctor described as a common but aggressive bout of the flu, I didn’t ask any more questions.
It was February, and my sister, Gemma, had just come home from a school camp. She’d only been home a few days when she started to feel sick. My mum kept Gemma out of school the day she fell ill, mainly because she was running a fever and vomiting – had been since the early hours of the morning. I went off to school.
When I came home about 6 hours later, Gemma had been vomiting so violently that the force of it had ruptured a blood vessel in her eye, and the sclera was completely red. She was very fatigued, and complained about muscle and joint pain, and a stiff neck. She complained about the light hurting her eyes and giving her a headache, but Gemma was prone to suffering photosensitivity with her migraines. There was a strange rash of small bruises on her arms and legs. The doctor had sent Gemma home. It was the flu, he said.
Gemma went to bed without any food or drink. A few moments after her head hits the pillow, she’s asleep. My mum always says that she knew something wasn’t right that day. I think she still beats her self up about it, because she should have followed her instincts more. I don’t really see it that way, because that night my sister had to sleep on a mattress beside my parents bed. If my mum hadn’t insisted on that, Gemma would be dead.
During the night, Gemma became disoriented and delusional. Her fever soared higher than it had earlier that day. She couldn’t keep down so much as a mouthful of water, let alone a pill. My mum sat on the side of her bed, watching over Gemma as she slept. Gem deteriorated through the night, and her headache appeared to be worse than any migraine she’d ever had. She complained that the pain was getting too much to handle.
“I want to die, just let me die,” she said, crying. “I wish I was dead.”
This is the mother of all diseases. The fact that it is only potentially fatal is possibly one of its worst features. Think that’s insensitive? Go tell that to a CF patient.
CF is a genetic disease inherited in an autosomal recessive fashion which means you’re an unlucky bastard if you do happen to inherit both dud versions of the CFTR gene. This disease manifests in the lungs, urogenital and skeletal systems, the pancreas, and the skin.
This is what it can cause:
Cystic Fibrosis is a nasty, nasty disease. Surely it must manifest during adulthood? Apparently, no. Let’s take a look at what the CF kids can look forward to:
Treatment for CF sucks balls, too. What can they do for you? Prescribe mucolytics to thin your mucus and allow you to cough it up (oh yay). Or, how about a bronchioalveolar lavage?
How about a Tetrodotoxin injection?
Well, so sad to see you leave France without having visited Paris (whatever are you doing, fool!?), but this blog will still follow you to your new home. That’s right, get yourself settled, because for a week at least, I will be sending… Letters to the Girl in Venice.
Ciao bella. Bacione.
Adrian.
It’s amazing what science and medicine is discovering about our world. However, sometimes the news floating around the medical world reads more like a cheesy tabloid than legitimate health related information. For example…
Got no willpower? That’s okay, just do some cardio at the gym and increase your heart’s variability! A new study found that willpower is a lot like muscle strength, in that it can be increased with a little training. Actual cardiovascular training, apparently! Why? Because self-regulation (willpower) and cardiac variability are both linked to the parasympathetic nervous system, so what affects one should affect the other, right? Want to develop some willpower – just maintain a consistent gym regime. Hm.
Pizza is the New Carrot Stick. Yes, that’s right – pizza is being hailed as the new ‘health food’. The University of Maryland claims that increasing the cooking time and temperature of pizza dough increases the antioxidant content by at least 60%. Sure, there’s no denying the benefits of antioxidants, but this is still pizza, right? Health food? Apparently so, but forget the cheese and meat, scientists say. Pizza is healthy – but only if you don’t use toppings.
Don’t Want That Blood Type? Change it, Then! Scientists claim that they can convert the main blood groups A, B, and therefore AB to the universal donor – O. All it takes is a couple of enzymes to safely degrade the blood group antigens on the surface of erythrocytes. This has been 25 years in the making, and would be invaluable to medicine, though it does read a bit like science fiction. What’s next….DNA disguising?
Adrian.
How exciting – a presidential election right there in France for a 5 year term! If I were in France, and French, I would vote Ségolène Royal for president because she seems rather well balanced (though not the most experienced of the 12 candidates) and of course, a socialist. Besides, the prospect of a female president in a country where women were granted the right to vote so much later than most countries is a bit exciting.
But I’m sure you’re completely unaware of the situation, being rather buried in French snow and all.
So i’m at uni, trying desperately to care about the diagnostics exam tomorrow morning, but I just can’t it’s so amazingly boring. It’s occurred to me that I haven’t given you some medical words in a while, so here goes: haematology, histology, cytology. If you get extra-specially bored, you could even google them.
Oh I almost forgot! Did you see anything about the Virgina Tech shootings? Good God, the Americans want to increase the availability of guns so they can defend themselves in such situations.
More guns!?
This sort of thing doesn’t happen in Australia (let’s all forget the Port Arthur Massacre for a moment), and why doesn’t it happen? Because we don’t give our bloody people bloody guns!
When will they learn?
Love you sis, quand apprendrez-vous à parler français avec moi? Write back to me.
NB. Large amounts of soft-drink will cause discomfort, and in some cases, painful stomach cramps as your inner workings expand with the gas. Ouch.
Two days ago my business partners and myself went into the studio with a very willing model (my roommate) to shoot some promotional photos. It was my first time as a photographer in the studio in a professional capacity – and it was a total calamity. For the first two and a half hours we were operating with two lights, which created an amazingly sharp and angular shadow on every angle of the model’s face. Beaut!
But anyway, nine hours and no cigarettes (!) later, we have a finished product….let me know what you think, feedback is always welcome!
Check out our myspace (we’re too under-funded to afford a real domain) – www.myspace.com/modelloportfolios
Heron Island is a small but beautiful coral cay on the Great Barrier Reef 80km off-shore. It is the home of some of Australia’s most beautiful and deadly species. It is also the home of the University of Queensland’s Research Station for Marine Studies, where I go to collect tissue samples for my research. Or, was. Now it is just a pile of ashes.
A small oxygen tank exploded in the early hours of the morning on Friday 30th March. The tank was only small, but the ensuing fire managed to destroy 11 buildings, including the laboratories, computer research station, and the homes of the research station’s permanent staff.
The research station was world class, and my team is booked to spend 16 days there in July. Damn! We’ll still be going back, but it won’t be the same, and the station will obviously only offer minimal facilities in the next 6 months. I have such great memories from the first trip, I’m worried this is going to change everything, as it won’t even look the same. This is a very selfish thought. Hm.
Thanks for the good memories, old station.
So I got given a turkey. It was very impressive, really, considering I’ve only ever cooked chickens and the considerably smaller quail. I looked at this giant poultry popsicle. How in the hell do I cook it?
Notice the skin tear…neglected bird.
So I decided it needed to be stuffed, because who knows what happens when it isn’t? I decided not to deviate from the norm here – I didn’t want the thing the collapse. Only now, with the bird stuffed full of my homemade stuffing (practically just bread and garlic), did I realise that I had no idea how long it needed to be cooked for. Surely only an hour or two, right?
Okay, so Google reccommends 3.5-4.0 hrs at 175 deg C for a bird 4-6 kg or until breast internal temperature is approximately 70 deg C, in which case the legs must be removed and cooked until internal temperature reads 80-85 deg C.
Fuck! Does anyone actually take notice of instructions like these?
I decided to ignore the confusing time constraints, but I inserted the thermometer just for the sake of appearances.
The turkey had not yet progressed to the oven before I seriously considered scotch. Just one would surely make the process a lot easier? No? Press on.
Okay, so turkey goes into the hot area. add some of this stuff:
(Where did that cranberry sauce come from? I certainly do not use the stuff from a jar!)
But it’s probably not a good idea to add any of this stuff:
‘This stuff’ happens to be sweet potato, rediscovered after a long period of time in the dark recesses of the pantry. Those things protruding from the potatoes can only be described as some sort of alien leg or motility agent. Possibly evolved flagella. Moving on.
Several hours and a pint of butter later…
Oh my god! It’s beginning to look a lot like turkey…
(And of course I cooked it upside down. Seriously – who does that?)
Handy Hints for Turkey Preparation:
Inivite the parents over so you can have them carve the bird and do things with the food you have spent hours preparing, but for some reason cannot care about now in the final moments.
And in the end, you know you’ve done well when the food makes your mama smile!
(Possible alternate source of smiling: she’s tanked on a whole bottle of white – love ya mum!)
Adrian.
Steve, the professor for my genetics course, is the devil.
I’d just like to express my frustration at the quiz that he set for us this past Thursday. I studied my ass off for this test. I was prepared. I was psyched.
I took one look at that test, and I was screwed. God! How could I have been so off mark with the study material? I knew none of this stuff, or very little. The more I scanned the pages of the test, the more I thought to myself ‘oh man, i’ve studied the wrong units for this.’ I left the exam after about 25 minutes, drenched in the scent of failure.
But to my surprise, I wasn’t the only one who felt this way . The others agreed - the content of the quiz was discontinuous with the content in class. It was clear after the test that we should have focussed on the minutiae; silly us, studying the ‘bigger picture’ things like gene regulation and the consequences of errors in regulation. No, that stuff is clinically relevant – it has no place in Biomedical science. All of this for 10%!?
Steve, why do you hate us?
Adrian.
