Never Hardly Some- Often Very Ever Times Often: Fill & Download for Free

Oh yes. Yes I do. Apply for jobs that are hard to get.The best way to find out how big a fish you really are is to get out of your pond. I was a reasonably high-achiever in my own eyes until I got to medical school. That was a moderate-size pond there, and knocked a little ego off. After graduating, though, and actually trying to do some real work, one realises how hard some problems are to solve and how damn clever some people trying to solve them really are - and they still aren’t getting very far.I always tell the story of how one of my friends who was an Ernst and Young IT consultant in a past life and is now an obstetrician wrote a pixel-program demonstrating the effects of genetic drift and the impact of lifespan length on Peppered Moth populations. He showed how death (as opposed to immortality) improves the efficiency of evolution, and submitted a manuscript to Nature as a joke. In his holidays. With at least one (maybe two?) kids already. For fun. Because he was bored.Those are the sorts of people who are out there, and they don’t often have the time or inclination (unlike me) to talk themselves up on the internet. Because they have things to do.Mark Ruff, I am never going to forgive you for making me watch that matrix turn from white to black on your laptop. I hate you. I’ve felt stupid ever since :)

I think most people would be appalled by what happens in the OR simply because they have these sanitized tidy images of their loved ones being gently worked upon.The reality of many procedures is they are gross, messy, violent affairs. e.g. Replacing a knee joint requires power sawing chunks of your bones away, then hammering in the replacement parts. Or watch a chest get sawed and cracked for heart surgery. Such things can seem rather brutal to the uninitiated!Reminds me of the time my wife took our son with a broken wrist to the ER. She was standing there soothing our child, and the orthopedist explained he needed to reorient and align the broken bones before casting. “You can stay if you want, but you have to go over and sit in the corner.” She did, and he proceeded to tug & wrench on the wrist to get it in place. She said his advice to sit down was good, as watching this violent and unnatural (yet totally correct) procedure occur with our son was rather shocking.Normal for medical professionals is shocking for the uninitiated.Also, most people imagine the OR as a sacred temple where only YOU the patient have ever entered for your (hopefully) once in a lifetime event. No, its a place where the surgeon and everyone else comes to nearly every day, replacing hundreds of joints a year (for example). It is a job, it can be very routine, and people in the OR pass the time (often hours of time) doing their jobs in the OR just like any other work. They chat, tell jokes, talk about tv shows and their upcoming vacations, etc.So I think it is hard for some patients to reconcile their hyper-charged emotional thinking about their very important surgery when confronted with the pedestrian reality that they are just another line on the ToDo list for people doing their daily normal job. Mind you, I’m not saying people just doing their jobs equals not caring or not compassionate. The best medical professionals are those who never lose sight of the fact that the things they know as routine are often spectacularly unique for the fragile complicated space of patients’ minds.

I had an Australian Shepherd named Kodie who died a few years ago just a week before his 16th birthday. He was my favorite dog ever. He was a playful clown most of the time but very protective of me and my family. If we got into just verbal arguments he would start howling and jumping up on us to stop. Nobody could threaten physical harm to anyone in the family without getting bowled over. He rarely bit though and never hard. He also showed special care to anyone who was sick. He would stay with them all the time.Kodie is the dog in the middle:But the most amazing things I observed were after my sister was almost killed in a car accident. After her coma and hospital release she came to live with us on our farm and had to endure many months of grueling physical and mental therapy (she still has some paralysis and permanent brain damage). Kodie was like her shadow and he tried to keep her mentally active during lessons we gave her by licking her and pawing her when she became listless. She would often flail around and hit him hard with her hands in her early stupors but he never seemed to mind.We had to put him away whenever the physical therapists came because he would try to knock them over and even tried to bite them a few times when my sister showed extreme pain in response to therapy. After almost 2 years my sister regained her mobility but often fell, just walking from room to room. Kodie would always accompany her and he would always break her falls by positioning himself just where she was falling. You could see he was very calculating about it. He frequently got injured, including one bad spill over 3 stair steps to keep my sister from falling down and off the side. He limped for 4 days after that one. He would groan or yelp slightly when she fell on him sometimes but otherwise didn’t seem to mind.Eventually my sister moved to an apt on our farm after she became largely independent. Despite bad arthritis that made it hard for him to get up and walk, he ventured up the steep hill to her place every day to check on her until the day before he died.