Two Hundred and Eleven, The Blind Side

WARNING! SPOILER ALERT!

"Michael Oher, you listen to me, all right? I want you to enjoy yourself, but if you get a girl pregnant out of wedlock I will crawl in the car, drive up here to Oxford, and I will cut off your penis."

I thoroughly enjoyed it. Of the whole movie, the part that caught me most unawares was the ending credits.

Two Hundred and Three, Three Friends

"The three boys, one dark, on e light, and one--for lack of a better word--fiery, do not notice the night.  Perhaps some part of them does, but they are young, and drunk, and busy knowing deep in their hearts that they will never grow old or die.  They also know that they are friends, and they share a certain love that will never leave them.  The boys know many other things, but none of them seem as important as this.  Perhaps they are right."

page 395, Chapter Fifty-nine from The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

One Hundred and Ninety-four, Cardiac Arrest

I have been remiss from this forum for quite a while mainly because I did forget about it in the jumble known as life.  This entry doesn't herald my sudden return to all things blog but it is to point out a small event that occurred earlier today.

A patient in the hospital for whatever reason stopped breathing and pumping his own blood.  Doctors rushed in along with nurses, I stood outside the room with my three colleagues.  I hear different orders being shouted through the air, "Get the crash cart!" "You start compressions!" "I'll get the kit" "Push another atropine!" "Stop! Does he have a pulse?" "Rotate on compressions" "We have a pulse!" "Ok, he's stable" "I lost the pulse!" "Quick, start compressions again!" and on and on.

At one point, one of the residents turns to me, points, and beckons.  As I near him, he tells me to leave my white coat outside the room.  I hurriedly rush in sans white coat and grab the gloves he gives me.  

"You're going to relieve the guy giving compressions."

My mind's jaw drops.  My physical body continues as directed to the side of the room where the folks giving compressions are standing and doing their job.  As I stand behind the fellow whose shoulders are heaving as he pushes heavily onto the old gentleman's sternum, someone tells him to pause to check pulses.  They find one!  Everyone relaxes (again) as the people in the room prepare to move the bed to the ICU.  As the connections are dropped, they notice his pulse is gone again.  Matt, my resident, turns to me and points me in.  I step up, place my hands as taught and practiced on rubber dummies, and start counting while doing my job.  I count ~50 compressions when the lady next to me says, "I can feel your compressions, stop so I can see if he's beating on his own."  I halt.  She still has a pulse.  I step back after glancing at Matt as the bed is wheeled off.  As I exit slowly behind the bed and its horde of people, my two colleagues come up to me and congratulate me on saving a life.  I stutter like I always do when I get a compliment.  Jokes continue into the night about using the story to score chicks at the bar.  I'm just happy he lived.  And constantly reminding myself in my mind about how oddly the feel of the elderly gentleman's chest felt just like the mannequins we practice on.  The only odd part was the face staring up at me slowly turning first purple, then pink with compressions, and with a mouth slightly parted in the agony of the situation...

One Hundred and Fourty-five, A Poem Reading

"Our love began with a glance across a parking lot.
You possessed me in just a few days.
I remember long drives through the countryside,
And long weekend getaways.

But the years passed, and like upholstery in the hot sun,
Your love began to fade.
And now in a time when I need your care the most,
You hit the blinker and turn away.

And while our gas tank of love may be running on fumes,
I still have plenty of love to share.
So if you have a quart of tenderness left for me in your heart,
Take me back to Firestone Complete Auto Care."

Roommate received the above poem signed, "Love, Your 2000 Neon." Yeah, corny, yet strangely hilarious!

One Hundred and Thirty-four, Highlights of Tonight

"Everything is upside down!"

This one came up when the precious boy laid down on the floor of the hotel and looked up at a tree which, from that angle, looked upside down.


"Your face is fuzzy!"

I'm carrying him and his arm brushes up against my unshaven chin. Without looking, he begins to slowly rub his arm against my chin. He then brings his hands up to my face and slowly rubs my short bear/heavy stubble. The entire process was involuntary since his attention was elsewhere in the hotel.


"This rock makes music!"

While the adults chat about other matters (like the recent road trip to Texas) the little boy cocks his head at something he can barely hear. Slowly he stands up on his booth seat and walks to the side with a decorative holder containing some plants and some rocks including one huge one. He leans in and changes his head position a couple times before turning back to us and telling us his wonderful discover.

One Hundred and Thirty, Gore Galore!

I'd like to take a second to warn you the following excerpt is very graphic.

"They didn't take it on the lam weirdly inside a cloud the way Clevinger had done. They didn't explode into blood and clotted matter. They didn't drown or get struck by lightning, mangled by machinery or crushed in landslides. They didn't get shot to death in hold-ups, strangled to death in rapes, stabbed to death in saloons, bludgeoned to death with axes by parents or children, or die summarily by some other act of God. Nobody choked to death. People bled to death like gentlemen in an operating room or expired without comment in an oxygen tent. There was none of that tricky now-you-see-me-now-you-don't business so much in vogue outside the hospital, none of that now-I-am-and-now-I-ain't. There were no famines or floods. Children didn't suffocate in cradles or iceboxes or fall under trucks. No one was beaten to death. People didn't stick their heads into ovens with the gas on, jump in front of subway trains or come plummeting like dead weights out of hotel windows with a whoosh!, accelerating at the rate of thirty-two feet per second to land with a hideous plop! on the sidewalk and die disgustingly there in public like an alpaca sack full of hairy strawberry ice cream, bleeding, pink toes awry."

I think it's odd that I've read Catch-22 twice and both times the same paragraph stopped me cold with the descriptions held therein. It's not a simple matter of saying that people outside of the hospitals in the war die quite unpleasantly. Different deaths, both inside and outside hospitals, are described in detail to show how the outside world is crazier than the inside world. And I love it. The last sentence really does draw me in for some odd reason (maybe the ice cream and italicized words) and makes me stop after reading it and think to myself, "Wow, how cool!" Note that this is strictly talking about how immersing the paragraph is, not necessarily the different methods of death described within the paragraph.

I'm hungry.

One Hundred and Eleven, Juno

"Doctors are sadists; who like to play God and watch lesser people scream."

One Hundred and Ten, Music Movement

"Every now and then I wonder where it went. It used to be all golden and lovely and now it's some sort of decaying mess. No, that's wrong, there's nothing wrong with it, rather I'm the one who screwed it up, went off the deep end. They always said I involved myself too much, I never learned to stay out of things I couldn't comprehend. Yeah, it's true. But you know what? I'd do it again in a heartbeat. Despite the breakdown that inevitably occurs, the vitality the intervening experiences bring rejuvenates me. Make me who I am and I won't deny myself that pleasure even at the expense of the great letdown at the end. Such is my life and I will bear with it."

Sounds like an idealistic martyr, doesn't it? Or a junkie.

I attended my fifth concert ever last night! It was some band I'd never heard of (surprise) and they were pretty good! I watched the people there moving with the music and liked seeing other people who felt the same way I did about the music. I don't have fancy moves to music, just the simple head/body bob and the foot tap. But closing your eyes and making those simple movements to the music is quite relaxing. In reality I guess the compressed sound hits upon my eardrum activating pathways to the brain which simultaneously spits out tons of dopamine if my body moves to the beat. And because of that chemical substance, it's wonderful. Oh yeah, I get high on music, don't you?

In other news, today is the Beatnik's 24th birthday. The Engineer drove up with plans on getting him sloshed tonight. [raises non-alcoholic glass] Here's to you two and good times!

Eighty-two, Life Doesn't Stop

I've been reading a new book I borrowed from a friend.

Soon I Will Be Invincible
by Austin Grossman

An excerpt:
"I'm not a criminal. I didn't steal a car. I didn't sell heroin, or steal an old lady's purse. I built a quantum fusion reactor in 1978, and an orbital plasma gun in 1979, and a giant laser-eyed robot in 1984. I tried to conquer the world and almost succeeded, twelve times and counting."

I read that and see pure comic genius.

Aside from that, I've been keeping busy with school. Big exams coming up this semester ranging from cumulative pathology exams to microbiology exams to the big one: Boards, USLME Step 1. And of course, I do my best to keep up with friends far and near. How about you? Staying sane in this crazy world?

Fifty, Nostalgic Cartoons

"but if our knees bend the other way, how would we ride the bicycle?"

-Pinky