Health insurance sucks

(Sorry this isn't more Halloweeny. I blew my best Halloween joke back in February.)

Guest Post: Mnemonics

Note: Contributed by Dr. Box

Photographic evidence

This is a follow-up to my last post... here is a photo from the resident lounge, showing what I used to do when I was bored waiting for people to sign out their patients to me:



I suppose I could have, like, read about medicine or something. Whatever.

Things to do in lecture

Photographic evidence

As a follow-up to this early post about doctor's handwriting, I would like to present an actual consult note from a patient's chart:



I don't know about you, but I can only make out maybe one word in that entire note. Can anyone tell me what it says? Or even what consult service wrote the note?

The 6 grades of heart murmurs

Join me in NaNoWriMo!

This year, I will once again be participating in National Novel Writing Month. It's this insane contest where you try to write 50,000 words of a really, really bad novel in just one month. And of course, they pick November, which is one of the shorter months.

It's a lot of fun to participate, and the best thing is that in order to "win," all you have to do is write 50,000 words. Last year I wrote 50K and I won! I didn't have to beat anyone or produce anything of quality and I still won! It's so easy!

If you plan to participate, feel free to friend me on the NaNoWriMo site. My username is Fizzy. You can follow my progress in my attempts to make it to 50K.

Photographic evidence

This is a new segment I'm doing, where I show photos I took during residency in order to prove that I'm not making shit up in my cartoons:

When I was doing clinics at the VA, usually I would come in first thing in the morning, and the examining rooms looked like they had been ransacked during the night:



(Yes, that is, in fact, a dirty pillow lying next to the computer.)

Gosh, I wonder who might be responsible for keeping things clean:



Oh, I guess it's me. Obviously, the responsibilities of a resident include not just patient care, but also some light janitorial work.

Embarrassing residency stories

VAS

Guest Cartoon: White Coat Ceremony

Contributed by Doctor Box

Graph

4-D Horse

OK, granted, this isn't a cartoon and has little to nothing to do with medicine, but just in case there are any math nerds reading this blog, they may find this amusing...

So while playing Skiball (the game of champions) a bit ago, I won the most fabulous prize ever: a Horses(TM) 4D puzzle!

I was terribly excited to find out how a 4D puzzle might work. How would they incorporate Time into the puzzle? I was a little bit concerned when the insert said that it was "3D + Details". Details does NOT constitute another dimension.

Anyway, I photographed the experience:

The puzzle box. Oooh, this is exciting!



The 4D horse begins to take shape. This appears to be a head of some sort. Still only 3D, but I'm hopeful.



Ew, have you ever wondered what the inside of a horse looks like? It's all black with lots of tiny squares.



The finished product (note the horseshoe-shaped puzzle box). We gradually accelerate the horse up to 88 MPH...



And our 4D horse enters hyperspace:

Aerosmith

Med student Q&A

Sleepovers vs. call