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Sexless Prairie-Based Reflection Period, Week 1

Right now I’m playing Dr. Queer, Medicine Woman out in Nebraska for the 3 weeks of my very last clinical rotation: Community Health. There are seven of us students getting put up in a Best Western. In lieu of the names of the other people I’m with, here’s their first initial, specialty, and a fear I made up about sleeping in the same bed I arbitrarily assigned to each one.

T., Psych – “What if she makes us wake up at the same time!”
A., Family NP – “What if her boobs touch me while I’m sleeping!”
J., Acute Care – “What if I wake up and feel intangible resentment I can’t address!”
A., Psych – “What if there’s a tornado and I don’t get the spot under the bed first!”
B., Psych – “What if I talk in my sleep and she listens and then uses it against me!”
M., Oncology – “What if she smells!”

So far, Nebraska has meant that I’m doing home visits to help fix people way-the-fuck-out-there in the birthplace of Kool-Aid or the Sausage Capitol of Nebraska. I go out in a team of two or more with a provider to someone who needs skilled nursing care: some hospice, some new moms, mostly wounds. Some that you could swipe a credit card through. I can’t say enough good about the commitment of the people working here, or how incredibly generous and funny and smart the patients are, so I’ll just refer you to the “expectations vs. evidence chart” (at bottom) and tell you that there’s one nurse, Pam, who is going off-roading in her Rubicon next week with her Daschund carefully seatbelted in shotgun. And someone who wanted us to tell someone else that they were living out the rest of their days “happily, in the Golden Life Center, in Broken Bone, Nebraska.”

We also have a nice host of meetings, like dropping in on the county public health department. Tomorrow we go to the local detention center to help implement a quick public health intervention there, Thursday we do a health picnic for families, and next week I will be at the meatpacking plant, which my preceptor reports as “very gruesome.” The other thing my preceptor reports, after 3 beers, is that she found herself in this particular town because Liza Minnelli’s tour crew came through the Connecticut truck stop diner where she was waitressing at in 1983 and invited her to come with, and she was very ready to leave, so she did, and this is as far as she got.

Is that cute new policeman any good at volleyball?

I’m reading Elizabeth Pisani’s awesome book The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels, and the Business of AIDS. My pitch: And The Band Played On, but Elizabeth Pisani was dancing to the band, and the band got distracted because her dancing was really quite good and then, regrouping, decided to actually start playing a song that didn’t fucking kill people. Better people with more time than me describe it as “a gale of fresh air” or “rollicking, eye-opening, hilarious account of the underbelly of international AIDS research” or just ”required reading.”

Watch her TED talk and realize, “Hey, this is that AIDS lady from that Vice interview. The researcher with the leather boots. Who explained that it may be safer to have unprotected sex with an HIV+ dude on meds than a dude who hasn’t been tested. And that oral sex doesn’t really transmit AIDS, not really.1 And she had those great boots.”2 Then, peep this mood booster!3 From a passage in a chapter about her work with the Waria, a group of sex workers in Indonesia:

Let’s all agree that this game happens every Tuesday at like 6pm, even if it doesn’t, so that when that time rolls around we can all take a slow moment to reflect about how wonderful it is that right now (Tues, 6pm) somewhere in the world (Indonesia) there is a team of commercial sex workers almost certainly kicking police ass in volleyball and really how bad can this world be if such wonderful things can happen in it, weekly even.


  1. Vice: So it’s like playing Russian roulette with a revolver with 12,000 bullets.
    Pisani: Yeah, but I still think you should use condoms. Or just go for oral sex.
    Vice: What are the chances there?
    Pisani: I’m not allowed to say zero—but there are about 70 million HIV infections in the world recorded today, and we know of 9 that have been transmitted orally. Unless you have really bad dental hygiene, the chances are infinitesimal. And if you’re the “inserter” in oral sex, the risk is even closer to zero.
    Vice: What about cunnilingus?
    Pisani: Ah, that’s zero. You can put me on the record saying that there is absolutely no risk in cunnilingus.
    Vice: Thank you, that is good to know.”
  2. I can’t emphasize too many times that my favorite kind of person in medicine is the kind who is wickedly funny and mean to other doctors but nice to patients and throws out all the rules that aren’t working and is also a genius who is right about everything. Unfortunately, I will never be one of those people, because I get bad grades. But enough! See also: Paul Farmer, whose name I used to think about keying into too-fancy cars with “MD”-tagged license plates back before I got into school and it became illegal for me to break the law.
  3. thanks dap.

“sunset eyes”

Soñarás

I have noticed a pattern in my limited (but enthusiastic) experience wasting my early 20s studying the most boring drugs imaginable. Here it is. The oldest drugs tend to have duller side effects–headache, heart palpitations, you puke, whatever. Newer drugs tend to replace these “comfortable old sweater” side effects with less serious but straight-up crazier ones. Prednisone, a steroid, can cause “inappropriate happiness.” Chantix, a pill to aid smoking cessation, makes a lot of people want to flat out put themselves in the ground–the Awl highlights in a “listicle without commentary” the 32 possible side effects: “32. Hostility, 31. Aggression, 30. Mania…” Parkinson’s drugs like Mirapex work by increasing levels of dopamine, the “goal-oriented” “reward-seeking” or “mean happy” neurotransmitter. This made enough people gamble compulsively that the FDA put a warning on the bottle about it. That cultural trope about our national granny blowing it all at Mohegan Sun? Runs deeper than you think. Oh, and we kind of knew that it did this 20 years ago anyway.

The motherlode of this strange new side effect world is none other than Ambien. Ambien!

Ambien, the nation’s best-selling prescription sleeping pill, is showing up with regularity as a factor in traffic arrests, sometimes involving drivers who later say they were sleep-driving and have no memory of taking the wheel after taking the drug.

….The traffic cases around the country include that of Dwayne Cribb, a longtime probation and parole officer in Rock Hill, S.C. Mr. Cribb says he remembers nothing after taking Ambien before bed last Halloween — until he awoke in jail to learn he had left his bed and gone for a drive, smashed into a parked van and driven away before crashing into a tree. Mr. Cribb is still facing charges of leaving the scene of an accident.

A registered nurse who lives outside Denver took Ambien before going to sleep one night in January 2003. Sometime later — she says she remembers none of the episode — she got into her car wearing only a thin nightshirt in 20-degree weather, had a fender bender, urinated in the middle of an intersection, then became violent with police officers, according to her lawyer. [nyt]

There’s also a lot of documented sleep-eating, although apparently none intense enough that anyone would register a domain about it, which someone did for http://www.sleepdriving.com (probably in their sleep.) If anyone wants to go halfsies on starting a blog called ~Ambien Narratives~ I’m in. Here, I’ll start:

Things People I Know or People That I Know Know Have Done on Ambien
1. written a lot of checks
2. taken the pill, put themselves in bed, and woken up just sufficiently enough to realize they were walking around their house slamming their face into walls like a mouse in a maze but not then enough to stop doing it
3. given their husband a full-on, lotiony foot massage of one half hour’s length after previously flat-out denying his request for it with disgust an hour prior
4. woken up to find themselves at their computer having just bought 1,000 off-brand beanie babies from ebay. this particular friend made good from bad in two ways. first, he indiscriminately tossed them into the crowd during shows at the all-ages venue he worked at. second, each and every night for a month, he would clandestinely drive by the house of his friend who had just become a dad, throw one on the lawn, and speed away.

not-now-ambien-walrus

the post about brain pictures

Picture: “The Cookie Theft”
Tests: Visual Extinction

This is a drawing used as part of an assessment of neurological function after someone has a stroke. It primarily assesses visual extinction, whose “characteristic symptom is…a difficulty to perceive contralesional stimuli when presented simultaneously with an ipsilesional stimulus.”

Wut

Gaze upon “The Cookie Theft.” We see both passive-aggressive maternal coping mechanisms (R) and the secondary effects of them on the behavior of children (L). If you had a stroke that damaged the left or right parietal lobe, you would still be able to explain this scene so long as you were presented with each side one at a time. Presented together, though, you would “visually extinguish”–ignore–the one on the opposite side of where you’d had the stroke. Just like ol’ Moms is ignoring excruciating ever-present pre-Friedan emptiness–or trying to! Right lobe damage, can’t see kids. Left lobe damage, can’t see mother. “Can’t read my, can’t read my, can’t read my Cookie Theft.”

Picture: The cover of Sunny Day Real Estate’s 1994 album Diary, “considered by many to be a defining emo album of the second wave” [W]
Tests
: n/a

Picture: “13MF”
Tests: Unconscious thought processes

The above is a card from the Thematic Apperception Test, which is like the Rorschach inkblots (“Describe what you see…”) but way easier to fuck up.  Tits, crying, darkness. Can’t “a butterfly?” your way out of this one.  My friend Noah is a graduate student in psychology and had to perform the test on himself for his homework:

Allen Duntz had had enough. She’s pushed him away for the last time. Yeah, he works the late shift, doesn’t mean he should have to come home to what essentially amounted to a corpse in his bed. Of course, she really was a corpse, but Allen wasn’t in the mood for puns. They’d been living together since shortly after she died. No seriously, no more puns…

His analytic self-evaluation of his own story: “This test is dumb and can never be objectively evaluated.” Other cards include, uh:

The story behind this and some others in the deck here.

OH HEY LOLA HOW’S SCHOOL GOING


executive realness

Rachel and I went out to Jones Beach on a cloudy Wednesday. We’re driving in Robert Moses Park and our car comes up on a traffic island with a tower (pictured) that seems to be the kind of place where someone sent back from the the afterlife would appear. We course around the island through the roundabout and notice several deer on its lawn, right outside the car. Rachel feeds one a damn cupcake or something. 20 feet after the loop there’s a sign that reads: “It Is Illegal to Feed The Deer!” Rach says, “If they didn’t want us to do it they should have put the sign next to the deer.”

deer1

Look at these fucking deers look at us!

deer2 copy

deer3

Then, this morning I finished my last test early and had some time to kill before being engaged by Local Medical School as a stunt cunt (gynecological training assistant). I text Jacky to see if she’s around at all, and she responds that she is available from precisely 11am-12pm. I pick her up at her school and we drive to a little patch of beach off of Morrissey Boulevard alongside 93. We decide to take a walk on the shore, and within 2 minutes I see something in the sand. It’s a message in a bottle, Dorchester-style, which is to say that it’s a blue post-it in an orange prescription container with the name sharpied over. I point at it and say, “Oh my god, Jacky, LOOK.” and she says, “I KNOW, the animal skull, right!?” What.

beachfinds

ocean prizes

She holds it up: yeah, half of an animal skull, enormous, molars still in the jaw. I’m like, “Sorry, what were you saying? Before we got interrupted by MAGICAL REALISM.”

i had a test this morning and i finished it very early and ended up getting to boston at 11am instead of 1pm. i texted jacky to see if she was around and she was–for a single hour

so i picked her up and we drove to a little patch of beach near umass boston/dorchester on 93
within like 2 minutes of walking on the shore i saw something and said, “oh my god, look” and jacky said, “i KNOW”
9:14 PM spideretcetera: what was it!
me: it was a prescription bottle that had a note asking god for blessings in it MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE STYLE
spideretcetera: whoa
me: and just as i picked it up jacky was like “no, this!” and she had retrieved a humongous half of an animal skull with molars still in it from the ocean
SIMULTANEOUSLY

the post about leeches

Please enjoy this brief recording from one of my lectures about the usage of leeches to heal surgical wounds. This is the face of a leech:

“I love helping!”

For instance, did you know that after they’re done eating, the leeches fall off and squirm away like little rascals, and you have to go on the hunt using their blood trails to track them down?

“Come find me!”

(Yeah, I’m the one calling everyone babies.)

“One of the great secrets about sex is that a lot of people don’t like it.” -David Halperin

Reasons I Have Had Sex That Did Not Make it Onto the List of 237 Used in the 2007 Study “Why Humans Have Sex” (pdf)

“I found sex with this person to be the easiest route to exacting long-term revenge on myself.”
“I was genuinely curious as to what a dick that huge would feel like despite the person once being described as, ‘To be [name redacted] and have that size dick is like having 100 tons of dynamite and no match.’”
“I told that person I would never have sex with them.”
“I found small talk at the orgy excruciatingly awkward.”


Reasons I Have Had Sex That Actually Did Make it Onto the List of 237 Used in the 2007 Study “Why Humans Have Sex” (pdf)

“The person was mysterious.”
“I wanted to change the topic of conversation.”
“I was slumming.”

call for contributions: please circulate widely

Hello my favorites,

As I may have already discussed with some of you, I am compiling a
list of mind-unfoldingly shitty things that have been said in romantic
contexts to people I love. Example of form: that time I got dumped by
Zander M. not by him saying “we need to talk” or “I met someone else”
or “Let’s see other people” but “I just met the most beautiful girl in
the world.” WHAT?!

Lines that when you heard them, you didn’t know whether to feel like
someone punched you in the gut or to laugh really really hard.
Completely out of touch, disrespectful, misogynist, or just plain
weird. Or mean. Mind benders. I can think of a friend who got told by
her ex boyfriend that even though she was perfect, he couldn’t be with
her, because he needed to just “follow his dick right now.” Anything
that could reasonably be answered after a recounting with: “THAT IS
INSANE! HOW DO YOU EVEN SAY THAT TO ANOTHER PERSON!?”

I’ll take: anything from the line itself, to line + enough context to
make it understandable, to I don’t know, if you want to write
something a couple pages long, it would probably be awesome and I’d
love to read it. If you can’t think of anything, or aren’t sure what
you think would fit, or don’t want to write it down straight, I’d be
happy to interview you in the meatworld or on gchat. I promise to yell
“what the fuck!” in all the right places.

You have complete control over the form–if you don’t want to be
identified, don’t want others identified, no problem. If you want to
name names, well, you know me. It will either be a zine or on the
internet. Maybe both. Suggestions, once again, welcome.

If you’ve been lucky enough to escape getting smacked with a line of
this foul nature, please pass this on to yr friends. Hell, pass it on
anyway. Sisterhood is powerful. I love every last one of y’all. Stay
gold and come write me sometime.


L.

(docsorrow@googular male)