I don’t normally tell many stories about the types of things I have seen while working as a paramedic, but this particular story does have a happy ending, is a little comical (well I think so anyways) and is somewhat relevant to the reproduction part of our current unit. I told part of this story to my tutorial group but decided I would just post the rest on the blog. No names and locations will be used to ensure confidentiality.

As a paramedic, our training was heavily geared towards managing acute, emergency situations. Most of the time it was to deal with chest pain, shortness of breath, and trauma. But, another skill that all paramedics receive training in, is how to deliver a baby. Today, this is not a very common call for a paramedic as most expectant mothers get to the hospital long before they would ever need a paramedic to deliver their baby. In fact, other than their inhospital training, most paramedics will never deliver a baby. Nevertheless, all paramedics are trained to deliver a baby, as well as manage complications such as breech delivery, problems with the umbilical cord, neonatal resuscitation, etc. The thing to remember though, is that although they call it delivering the baby, it is the mother who does all the work. For the most part childbirth is an uncomplicated process, and mothers have been having babies long before any doctors were around. Usually you will just be there to “catch”. Now onto the story…

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I was thinking the other day about the alphabet. Actually I came to it in a somewhat roundabout way, but more on that in a second…

So we have an alphabet right? But what have we been doing to improve it? I’ll tell ya what. Nothing. We have had the same basic alphabet since….. well I have no idea how long, but given that it’s called the roman alphabet (or at least I think it is), I’m gonna guess we’ve been using the same alphabet for some time. Now that’s not to say that there haven’t been attempts to update it, let’s not forget Saturday Night Live’s attempt to promote a metric alphabet a fair few years back, but let’s be serious, LMNO can NOT be a single letter, it just doesn’t work.

What we need here is not a pared down alphabet. We need an all new and improved (read expanded) alphabet. And I humbly submit what I think is a suitable first extension. It came to me like a winters storm. All seemed so calm, and then suddenly… epiphany.

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This weekend the Bluenose Marathon was held and, as many of you are aware, a number of people from our class decided to train for this event. Our class had a good showing with representation in every distance category, and here is a list of those who participated.

5K – Mat Kiberd, John Morash, David Conrad, Kate Read, and Claire Hamilton
10K – Tiffany O’Donnell, PJ Rasmussen, Shasta Moser, and Alex Nelson
21.1K – Jon Chung, Annie Colwell, and Arpun Bajwa
42.2K – David Sibley

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I forgot how good it feels to write. Not just a short little blog, or a journal entry, and no, not even those lovely papers that we all enjoy writing. I’m talking about writing a short story, something I used to do frequently when I was young, but somehow got out of the habit of doing. To be honest, I haven’t written in years. I’d all but given it up. I’m not sure why. Up until sometime in high school, I was convinced I was going to become a novelist. And if not a novelist, well then, an English teacher who wrote on the side. But somehow I ended up getting a science degree, and thought sadly to myself (but would never admit) that I’d put the pen down for good! How, you ask? Perhaps it can first be traced back to my grade 9 science award. If I hadn’t gotten that, I’m not sure I would have had the confidence to do IB (International Baccalaureate) biology. But I did, loved it, and decided to enrol in biology and English in university. Already, my “science” identity was rivalling that of language arts, which was not so conducive to my creative writing efforts. My language arts identity got further eroded by a bad experience in first year English and my vow never to take another university English class ever again. SO science it was. Somehow in the midst of pipetting, dissecting, and studying, my writing (apart from labs or the odd paper) fell by the wayside. It was easy to let my “science” identity define myself, and not to make time for other things that mattered but that took time, like writing.

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Well the Bluenose Marathon is fast approaching (May 18) and I hope everyone is doing well with their training. Keep it up, we’re almost there. Myself, I am in the tapering down part of my training to ensure my legs have some time to recover before I have push myself that extra 10 km to reach 42 km. But I have had a little bit of a setback. April 27th I was doing my last long run of 32 km and around 22 km I started to develop some knee pain. Now I know the logical thing to do would have been to stop, but I was in Dartmouth and still 10 km from my apartment, so I just sucked it up and ran home.

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ps. What is it with the Killam??

Schroeder is one of the more imaginative characters and probably the least tethered to reality. He exists in an alternate dimension that is filled with music and his main link to our own dimension is through his toy piano. In some ways, he shares many similarities to Linus. Both are intelligent, introspective thinkers with abnormal attachments to certain physical objects. For Schroeder, his ‘security blanket’ is his piano, though he is able to walk away from the piano for extended periods of time without undue anxiety. And while Linus reflects about the nature of truth and the human condition, Schroeder is more concerned with discovering the true meaning of art as it pertains to music.

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OR How I Learned to Love/Tolerate Medicine

I spent first semester feeling guilty. What was I doing here? Anatomy wasn’t my cup of tea, Metabolism and Function scared the bejeezus out of me. Long story short: I was not having fun. And I felt guilty because isn’t everyone in medicine supposed to love every second of it? Aren’t there other people out there who’d kill to be where we are? And seriously, we all worked our little tushies off to get here. I thought about quitting. I was pretty sure I’d made a mistake; there were bigger fish to fry in the world of global politics and health policy and I just was not cut out for all this technical stuff. Medicine was a recent decision for me – and clearly the wrong one.

I don’t know if it was just having a vacation to unwind and regroup that made January seem brighter, or if I’d, unwittingly, had an epiphany in my subconscious over the Christmas break. Either way, coming back in January, school seemed less like the bane of my existence and more like something I could perhaps tolerate. Euphoria reminded me of the good life outside my books, and a spontaneous realization – I mean a deep, honest-to-goodness, in my heart not just in my head realization – that the M&F exam would not determine my future helped me make the final step from tolerating school to maybe enjoying it a tiny little bit. I mean tiny.

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Preface: This post is actually my humanities elective essay. I thought I’d throw it up here in case any one is interested in the subject of empathy in medicine, or curious about what it’s like to jump into a white coat after being a patient for most of your living memory.

I have vivid childhood memories of the time I spent as a patient with Crohn’s disease in the children’s hospital here in Halifax. I was 11 when I was diagnosed, and thus I’ve spent more than half of my life living with it. Medicine became important to me as a career during my third year of university, when I realized it is the perfect confluence of everything that makes me happy in life. Even still, I have spent far more time identifying as a patient with Crohn’s than I have as an aspiring doctor. This post is a reflection on my experience of moving toward equilibrium between these roles; patient and doctor in training. I reflect on the degree to which my previous experience as a patient affects my bedside manner and clinical judgment with regard to patients whose position reflects my childhood experience.
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I don’t know about everybody else, but I felt kinda weird sitting in that communications session on Friday afternoon. You see, my undergrad was a double major in psychology and philosophy, so I spent plenty of time hearing about Sigmund Freud, unconscious emotions, and all that stuff that was taught to us on Friday. The difference though was when I learnt about the stuff in my undergrad it was mostly for historical purposes to highlight how psychology can go wrong.

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