I've been having a lot of weird dreams lately. It's odd because I almost never remember my dreams, and now I realize that it's with good reason. Each dream has one kinda dark/sinister element, and then something completely ridiculous happens. Let's examine dream number one (I realize most people don't find dreams interesting, but I think these are entertaining, so humor me):
In this first dream, I'm working the graveshift security job at a museum. Oddly enough Chithra was my partner at the job (my subconscious seems to think our grad degrees are useless). Anyway, so we're just hanging out, and it's really dark and creepy in the museum. We hear people breaking in...and instead of being good security guards, we run and try to hide. All of a sudden my dream turns into a scary movie where the bad guys are slowly hunting us in the dark and we're trying to, you know, not die. It was actually really suspenseful in the dream. But then, the head bad guy shows himself, and he promises not to hurt us if we make him pancakes. Saved by pancakes! The dream goes on for a bit, but everything pretty much turns out ok. It was a pretty elaborate dream considering the message in the end was "I'm hungry."
The second dream was pretty short and vague, but it was weird enough to warrant my mentioning it here. The first thing that I remember is a car in a frozen lake with a dead body in the trunk. For some reason, it's my job to get the dead body out of the lake. You'd think with modern technology, this wouldn't be such a big deal, but I have no idea how to get a dead body out of a car in a frozen lake. I spend a large chunk of the dream talking about how to do this with my colleagues - none of which I recognize. I then start freaking out that we need to get a golf cart, because the lake is in the middle of a golf course and it would be poor etiquette to bring heavy machinery there (obviously). The dream ends with me riding to the lake in a golf cart and poking the dead body with a large metal pole. Because I'm just that good.
The final dream is, in my opinion, the weirdest dream. I know what you're thinking. "But Camellia, how much weirder could it get after the whole poking a dead body in a frozen lake thing?" Pretty fucking weird, buddy.
This dream starts out in London and guest stars Dina. Hi, Dina! So, we're in London and crossing Tower Bridge, but instead of it being a normal bridge, it's actually a rollercoaster. This dream was particularly vivid for some reason. When the rollercoaster took a gut-wrenching drop, I could feel the breath being knocked out of me. It was neat. Anyway, the rollercoaster ends up in the Underground, but instead of it being the actual London Underground, it's now the London BART system. We wander through BART for a while and I get lost a couple of times. Of course, if this were realistic, Dina would be the one getting lost, but she knew where she was going for some reason. We ended up at one of the stations watching a street performer with a bunch of other people. One of those people happened to be Bono (since when am I a U2 fan?), who naturally invited us back to his place. Once we're at Bono's place, he gave us ketamine. I actually don't really even know what ketamine is, but my dreams seem to be all for it. Anyway, we then go hot-tubbing and I started freaking out because I brought two bathing suits, and I couldn't seem to match them properly. I kept mismatching the tops with the bottoms, which wasn't as funny then as it is now, but this all took a long time. It literally felt like hours that I was sitting there trying to figure out how to match the bathing suits properly. Dina eventually dragged me out of the dressing room, and that's where the dream ends. I know, it's anti-climactic, but I think the Tower Bridge rollercoaster and Bono are hard to top.
Yeah, so my subconscious is nuts. I challenge people who think dreams mean something to come up with an explanation for those. I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure they all mean I'm insane.
Saturday, October 25, 2008
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Brains!
Due to popular demand, and by popular demand I clearly mean Dina, I have brain stuff to show. For the summer I worked with a funcitonal neurosurgeon. Functional neurosurgery deals more with quality of life issues. While the central nervous system structure is mostly normal, it functions abnormally (like in Parkinson's or people with pain disorders) and people get to neurosurgeons after failing other forms of treatment. My main focus was deep brain stimulation, which places electrodes into the brain to override an abnormal electric signal. It's used mainly in Parkinson's and other diseases that cause tremors, although they're testing it for severe depression. Anyway, this is what the surgical setup looks like:
The thing sticking straight out of the dude's head is essentially a motorized drill. The electrodes are drilled into the brain until they reach the right area, which has its own special electrical signal that the surgeon listens to and recognizes (I've heard it, its like different degrees of audible fuzz, which apparently means something). It turns out to look something like this in the end:
I was too lazy to cut the person out of the picture, but the cool thing is the x-ray. You can see how deep the electrodes go into the brain. The wires under the scalp travel down the neck to a battery pack that lies just over the pec muscles. The battery, mind you, is like $20,000. This stuff is suuuper fancy. Most people don't have a problem with the batteries (they stick out a bit like a pacemaker) but they do get a lifetime of pat-downs at the airport since going through a metal-detector is a bit out of the question.
They do a similar thing for the spinal cord. For people with a lot of nerve pain that can't be treated any other way, they put a similar stimulator over the spinal cord. The current from the stimulator creates a tingling sensation that sort of masks the pain from the messed up nerves. It's a closed surgery - they do everything through needles and tubes - so there are no decent pictures except through x-rays that I can't seem to find. So look! Random brains!
The coverings are still over the actual brain, but those sure are some juicy arteries. :)
And look, brain cancer:
So yeah, that's all i got for now.
The thing sticking straight out of the dude's head is essentially a motorized drill. The electrodes are drilled into the brain until they reach the right area, which has its own special electrical signal that the surgeon listens to and recognizes (I've heard it, its like different degrees of audible fuzz, which apparently means something). It turns out to look something like this in the end:I was too lazy to cut the person out of the picture, but the cool thing is the x-ray. You can see how deep the electrodes go into the brain. The wires under the scalp travel down the neck to a battery pack that lies just over the pec muscles. The battery, mind you, is like $20,000. This stuff is suuuper fancy. Most people don't have a problem with the batteries (they stick out a bit like a pacemaker) but they do get a lifetime of pat-downs at the airport since going through a metal-detector is a bit out of the question.They do a similar thing for the spinal cord. For people with a lot of nerve pain that can't be treated any other way, they put a similar stimulator over the spinal cord. The current from the stimulator creates a tingling sensation that sort of masks the pain from the messed up nerves. It's a closed surgery - they do everything through needles and tubes - so there are no decent pictures except through x-rays that I can't seem to find. So look! Random brains!
The coverings are still over the actual brain, but those sure are some juicy arteries. :)And look, brain cancer:
So yeah, that's all i got for now.
Sunday, October 19, 2008
So...it's been a while
I have an exam tomorrow, and frankly, I'm bored out of mind. I've read most of the news, chatted online for a bit, watched some tv, did some studying in between, and, out of a lack of anything else to do, I started reading some of my old posts. Yes, I remembered that at one point I used to keep a blog. Shocking, I know. It was fun though. It's like going back through a yearbook, you know, if that yearbook's only about me and not full of crap people.
So as an update, the whole finding friends thing fell through pretty hard. People here suck. I miss my friends, I miss California, I miss eating good food...Chicago blows. On the up-side though, I've been doing a crazy amount of yoga, I'm 99% sure I'm going into neurosurgery (if they'll take me) and I've lost some weight because of the aforementioned unappetizing food in this city.
Where to start? Probably with my test tomorrow. I don't know what it is, but I just don't want to study. This unit is more poorly organized than usual. The random topics they've decided to "introduce" to us include: genetically-acquired diseases, pharmacokinetics, antibiotics, cancer, transplant pathology and autoimmune diseases. I mean, wtf. None of this stuff is interesting when it's taught in such a limited fashion, which makes me just not care. Whatever, it'll be over tomorrow. I just need to pass.
The neurosurgery thing was really neat. I saw a lot of cool surgeries (brains!), learned a lot about different neuro diseases and got to see patients. It was fun running around the hospital in my white coat and scrubs. I imagine it'll be more fun when I know stuff, too, but whatever. It's funny how people get divided up in medicine. The personality types are so strong. People who like knowing everything about everything and talking about it for hours go into medicine. People who like actually doing something go into surgery. Within surgery, you have the general surgeons vs. the specialists. The specialists look down on the general surgeons, because they work in "bile and shit" all day (quote courtesy of one of the neurosurgeons I work with). Even within neurosurgery there are factions. There are the spinal surgeons, vascular neurosurgeons, functional neurosurgeons, etc. The fun part is that they all look down on each other. I love the inflated egos and nonsense hierarchies that make up medicine. It makes me think I picked the right career. :)
Anyway, I'm going to try to update this thing a little more regularly. It'll switch things up in my boring, boring life. But at least I can use stories from the past 6 months to make this sucker entertaining, hopefully...Heh.
So as an update, the whole finding friends thing fell through pretty hard. People here suck. I miss my friends, I miss California, I miss eating good food...Chicago blows. On the up-side though, I've been doing a crazy amount of yoga, I'm 99% sure I'm going into neurosurgery (if they'll take me) and I've lost some weight because of the aforementioned unappetizing food in this city.
Where to start? Probably with my test tomorrow. I don't know what it is, but I just don't want to study. This unit is more poorly organized than usual. The random topics they've decided to "introduce" to us include: genetically-acquired diseases, pharmacokinetics, antibiotics, cancer, transplant pathology and autoimmune diseases. I mean, wtf. None of this stuff is interesting when it's taught in such a limited fashion, which makes me just not care. Whatever, it'll be over tomorrow. I just need to pass.
The neurosurgery thing was really neat. I saw a lot of cool surgeries (brains!), learned a lot about different neuro diseases and got to see patients. It was fun running around the hospital in my white coat and scrubs. I imagine it'll be more fun when I know stuff, too, but whatever. It's funny how people get divided up in medicine. The personality types are so strong. People who like knowing everything about everything and talking about it for hours go into medicine. People who like actually doing something go into surgery. Within surgery, you have the general surgeons vs. the specialists. The specialists look down on the general surgeons, because they work in "bile and shit" all day (quote courtesy of one of the neurosurgeons I work with). Even within neurosurgery there are factions. There are the spinal surgeons, vascular neurosurgeons, functional neurosurgeons, etc. The fun part is that they all look down on each other. I love the inflated egos and nonsense hierarchies that make up medicine. It makes me think I picked the right career. :)
Anyway, I'm going to try to update this thing a little more regularly. It'll switch things up in my boring, boring life. But at least I can use stories from the past 6 months to make this sucker entertaining, hopefully...Heh.
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