Happy New Year!

I hope everyone's been enjoying the holidays and is ready for 2013!

I've been blissfully lazing around during my winter break after wrapping up my ob-gyn clerkship. After seeing all these deliveries and scrubbing in on the C-sections, I have extreme respect for mothers. Mad respect.

As one of the many perks of being a lowly medical student, one of our duties is usually gathering the general history of the patient in triage. So when a woman in labor is busy breathing her way through a contraction and squeezing the threads out of the sheets, hey - you get a medical student hovering over you, asking about your chief complaint ("What do you think? I'm in freaking labor!"), past medical/surgical history, your previous deliveries ("Can't you pull up the information from my medical charts? I've been here before!"), current medications, allergies, STDs, abnormal pap smears ("No, no, no, NO."), etc. Believe me, we're very sorry, but we enjoy the process as much as you enjoy resisting the urge to throw something at our heads.

So ob-gyn was fun, in that mildly traumatizing way.

Anyway, a friend gave me this snow globe for Christmas and at first glance, I was like, "Aw, this is super adorable. It even plays music while I watch the snow fall. I'm going to treasure this forever!"

And then, the other day, I take a closer look:

Be happy, indeed. A bear gleefully prepared to trample a tiny turtle beneath its huge paw. Or caught right in that magical moment before he sends a flying kick at the turtle's head.

Am I to assume this is a subconscious manifestation of my friend's real feelings for me?

Am I a puny turtle, idiotically grinning away, while the shadow of a foot looms over my head?

No.

When the moment comes ...

I shall be the bear.

Sex Therapy

A lecture we had during psychiatry clerkship was on sex therapy.

The lecturer touched upon paraphilias (sexual arousal to objects, situations, or individuals that are not part of normative stimulation, causing distress to the individual or harm to others) for a while and described an experience she had:

One night, the phone rang and she went to pick it up. On the other end, a man breathed harshly before diving into obscene comments and lewd suggestions. Instinctively, she slammed the phone down.

Then, with her hand still on the phone, she thought about this.

The phone rang again and she picked it up. It was the same guy making the same crude remarks and this time, she informed him, "This is an impulse disorder you have, which I imagine would probably cause you a lot of distress. I know where you can get professional help -"

The guy hung up on her before she could finish.

But then, a few minutes later, the phone rang again and when she answered, he asked, "Does the place accept Medicaid?"

"True story!" she stressed as we all laughed in disbelief.


Sorry for being awol. Been really busy lately. I finished my psychiatry and neurology clerkships and I'm now on my pediatrics clerkship. I'm on nursery week and all the babies are so, so adorable - even though a fellow student said that he's since realized all newborns look like Winston Churchill.

Winston Churchill, Master of The Disgruntled Baby Stare-down

Once Again, No Plagiarism

Please Do Not Plagiarize. Honestly. I can't believe how many times I have to stress this. Since there are actually people out there who would not only steal my stories, but also blatantly lie to readers, claiming that I had given them permission to do so, I'd like to make a note here as well as on my fictionpress profile: I have never and will never give anyone permission to repost my stories on another site. Especially when they're changing the names of the characters. As if that's not fishy enough.

Is that clear enough? 

I believe I had already mentioned before in a prior blog post that I absolutely do not want other people to post my story up on other sites even if they say that they'll credit me. If I want the stories up on any other sites, I can very well do that myself, thanks. 

My deepest gratitude to the readers (special thanks to Sarah) who informed me about the wattpad plagiarist. Thankfully, with their help, this incident seemed to have been resolved before I even got home from the hospital today. I am so relieved. Frankly, I'm pretty tired after call and I really wasn't looking forward to dealing with this issue yet again. I'm so thankful that there are still awesome, conscientious readers out there who would take the time to actively help correct a wrong. You're the best.