Learning Just Happened Here

I've hit another milestone on the med school path: learning the rectal and male genito-urinary tract exams.

I had an incredibly positive experience last Monday as I was fortunate enough (as all US med students are, I think) to learn from a patient-instructor who was generous enough to donate his time, efforts, and body to the greater medical education cause. I can't even imagine what it must be like for instructors to allow naive and inexperienced medical students to intimately explore the most private and protected parts of their bodies. And I can't thank my instructor and all other instructors out there for their important contributions to mine and my fellow classmates' educations. They have helped us become a little more comfortable during a part of the physical exam that can be almost as anxiety-provoking for the examiner as it is for the examinee.

Sadly, I haven't had as much time to reflect on the event and what it means to me. All I can come up with right now is the usual cliche of it prompting in me a deeper understanding of my obligation and duty to provide the best care possible for my patients, both on the individual and population levels, and my even greater gratitude for the privilege of being a part of my patients' lives in ways most people cannot be. Though all of this true, my gut tells me it doesn't quite describe what I want to express and how I felt about the experience. Hopefully more on that if I ever get the time to sit down and think about it.

Boston Motorists

"Epileptic patients often have a hard time getting a license," one of my Neuro professors said as he was trying to teach my classmates and me about the psychosocial impact of epilepsy for those who suffer from it. "One can imagine the danger they can be on the road to themselves and others if they experience a seizure while behind the wheel. Their driving would be erratic and unpredictable with loss of car control." He then paused. I just knew he was about to drop a zinger.

"Observing motorist behavior on Boston roads, I would say that epilepsy must be incredibly prevalent here." He delivered the line with a sly smile.

Insensitive? Yes. Inappropriate? Yes. But still, that made my day.

Three Cheers for JNJ Turo-Turo

Just thought I'd make a plug for the only Filipino restaurant in all of Massachusetts, and potentially all of New England.

When Lawrence and I first moved to Boston in 2005, we looked up on all sorts of food forums where to try to find a restaurant that served our comfort food, our family food- Filipino food. "For Filipino food in Boston," I remember one particularly angry Filipino in Boston wrote on yelp.com, "go to Queens. New York." Disappointing, I thought, but not surprising; among other things, Boston isn't exactly known for diverse cuisine.

In June 2007, that changed. JNJ Turo-Turo in Quincy opened its doors. It's an absolutely lovely place that serves delicious, not too greasy, homecooked Filipino food. Lawrence and I have tried to go every other week since we learned about it in December 2008. We find comfort there, as if we were somehow home with our families. It's really helped unfriendly Boston become a little more livable.

Anyway, I'm only making this plug now since 1) I'm between blocks in med school and have time to blog and read the paper and 2) it's recently been written up in the Boston Globe. (Find the article here and their website with a menu here.)

Living in a World of Fools

Sometimes, it just takes the right lyric in the right song to make your dreary day go away.

"Cause we're living in a world of fools, breaking us down."

Yes, I just quoted The BeeGees. But somehow, they just made me feel better. They serenaded me, validating everything I've been struggling with lately and summarizing so eloquently (again, yes I just called The BeeGees eloquent) in one line all the angst I've been feeling and unable to verbalize so concisely.

I think this blog post is a testament to how tired I am right now. I need to sleep more than 5-6 hours a night so that I can find inspiration in something/someone other than The BeeGees.

Spain, Japan, the US, and Ondoy

The Philippines can just never catch a break. Typhoon Ondoy left a month's worth of rain in Manila in just 12 hours. (See video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYrSYTIT3k0&feature=related) The destruction is heartbreaking. I wonder how long it will take to bring Manila back to what it was before the typhoon. The "Paris of the East", as Manila was once known to the world before WWII, continues to sink.

Goodbye, American Thai Restaurants

No more Thai food in America for this little lady.  Since returning from Bangkok, Lawrence and I haven't had the balls/ovaries to try Thai food again in America.  We felt so spoiled by our time in culinary heaven (aka Bangkok street food vendor tables) that we figured that Thai food in the US would be a big disappointment.  

With the beginning of 2nd year for me came the free lunch talks, serving Thai food. So I ventured.  I took a scoopful of pad thai to my taste buds.  I couldn't believe how "non-Thai" the pad thai tasted to me!  I guess as expected, it was completely Americanized, i.e. bland.  

Shortly after that first taste, my ears started to itch, the first sign in my body that I'm allergic to something I'm eating.  Then my stomach started to ache.  My body was physically rejecting American Thai food.  I had to excuse myself from the talk to tend to my poor body in shock.

Looks like I'll have to return to Thailand to ever enjoy good Thai food again.  Woe is me.

Summer in the City

means cleavage cleavage cleavage. Well, it does, but those are Regina Spektor's words.

Summer in the city, for me, means smells smells smells. The heat and the humidity of New York City summers accentuates all the city has to offer the schnoz.

For the worse: Urine smells are more pungent. Dog poop takes a new, smellier life form. And if you are from Staten Island, the dump really rares its ugly head in the summer.

For the better: Fresh vegetables and herbs on windowsill gardens finally have life. Fragrance from the flowers sold at the corner delis can be enjoyed from across the street. Ice cream ice cream ice cream!

But for a prettier and just all around better presentation of this subject, I again turn to nytimes.com for help. In Op-Art, Jason Logan has created an interactive map of Manhattan that details of the smells he encountered during one sweltering weekend tour of Manhattan. Sometimes I think I should have just worked for the New York Times and found creative ways to express my love for NY, and get paid for it!

Back

We've returned to Boston and our old lives. We've returned to using our bikes as our main medium of transportation, sleeping in an elevated bed, and having excellent water pressure in the shower. And we've also returned to taking the time to preparing our own meals.

This last one, surprisingly, has been a bit of a shocker. As I cooked breakfast this morning, I felt strange investing any time into our meals, even though we've been cooking in our lives away from home for almost a decade. Though I of course remembered all the usual motions of it, the routine felt foreign, almost wrong. For the last two months in Bangkok, we've been going out to the street every morning to buy breakfast. We'd get our Chinese donuts freshly made or our Puff & Pie bakery pastries or our 7-11 banana breads, each for less than 75 cents, and our usual big iced coffee for less than a dollar. We'd then come back to the apartment and watch CNN or True (i.e. Thai HBO) or Channel V (i.e. Thai MTV, but plays only music videos, so more like MTV of the 80s) and enjoy our ready-made meal. The whole routine provided a cheap, delicious, and filling breakfast after very little time investment.

Preparing meals is of course one of the many aspects of the culture shock/reacclimatizing Lawrence and I are experiencing. Funny how quickly you can get used to another way of life in just two short months.

More to come on the funny things about our life in Boston I never realized would be so thought-provoking as well as (hopefully) posts about what everyday life was like in Bangkok.