Truly, we live in an age of wonders. Some of the shared valencies here make sense, like William Shatner and Bacon (both hydrogenic). But it takes a deep thinker to elucidate the chemical kinship between Boobs and Lightning, or Cheetah and Mullet.
Turns out that more women, the world over, want to marry doctors than any other professional.
JEK, M.D.
Outlier
The noble and high purpose of this blog is certainly not to promote film and television programs of other people's making. But it is, on some level, to be an arbiter of genius. And given the quality of Season 1, it seems reasonable to promote Season 2 aggressively:
At this quite delightful blog (also linked on the right).
h/t Alex Cochran.
JEK
Is often told what's what by cute animals.
Scout Tufankjian, an old friend mine (and of all of us here at Nation Indivisible), recently ended a run as the Person With The Best Job Ever. Which job, of course, was being the lead freelance photographer of the Obama campaign, from the fist days in New Hampshire to Election Day. Needless to say, this is completely, mind-bendingly amazing. And while I can't really imagine what it must have been like to live the campaign that was completely mesmerizing just to watch from a distance, Scout has been kind enough to provide a few ways to try.
The most important one is her new annotated book of photographs.
Which she also described recently on CNN:
JEK
Bought 10
One of the founding precepts of Nation Indivisible -- if you can the loose association of cat herding principles that constitute our founding document "precepts" -- it's that all writing is biased and should be trumpeted as such.
So let me say that when it comes to articles written about bitter, unhelpful surgery residents, I'm really biased. Because I know that situation really well, and I always perceive a certain amount of bias on the part of the reporter, who presumably hasn't been paid minimum wage to stay up for 30 hours straight, working 80 hours a week trying to keep a bunch of people alive while also trying to keep both nurses and attendings happy. Which task is seldom fun and frequently impossible.
This article in the NYT is a classic example of a growing literature on this subject. Let's look at one section in particular, from among many of a similar theme:
It was the middle of the night, and Laura Silverthorn, a nurse at a hospital in Washington, knew her patient was in danger.
The boy had a shunt in his brain to drain fluid, but he was vomiting and had an extreme headache, two signs that the shunt was blocked and fluid was building up. When she paged the on-call resident, who was asleep in the hospital, he told her not to worry.
After a second page, Ms. Silverthorn said, “he became arrogant and said, ‘You don’t know what to look for — you’re not a doctor.’ ”
He ignored her third page, and after another harrowing hour she called the attending physician at home. The child was rushed into surgery.
“He could have died or had serious brain injury,” Ms. Silverthorn said, “but I was treated like a pest for calling in the middle of the night.”
Her experience is borne out by surveys of hospital staff members, who blame badly behaved doctors for low morale, stress and high turnover. (Ms. Silverthorn said she had been brought to tears so many times that she was trying to start her own business and leave nursing.)
Professionals like Ms. Silverthorn, the nurse in Washington, said the change was overdue.
“We go to school, we have a very important job, but there’s no respect,” she said.
She recalled a particularly humiliating moment on Dec. 25, 2006. Working in the pediatric emergency room, she called a drug by its generic name rather than its brand name.
“I was quickly shouted out of the trauma room and humiliated in front of everyone,” she said. But while “everyone knew the doctor was actually the one who didn’t know what he was doing,” she continued, no one said a word.
