Silliness: Medical Notes

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An e-mail from Mom. Normally I don’t pass these kinds of things on (via e-mail or the web), especially when they’re already posted on Snopes (this one is listed as ‘Undetermined’), but this one had both Prairie and I in stitches (no pun intended) as we read through it. Lots of good arguments for the importance of clarity in writing in here!

A selection of choice writings taken from medical (and nursing!) notes!

  • By the time he was admitted, his rapid heart had stopped and he was feeling better.
  • Patient has chest pain if she lies on her left side for over a year.
  • On the second day the knee was better and on the third day it had completely disappeared.
  • She has had no rigors or shaking chills, but her husband states she was very hot in bed last night.
  • The patient has been depressed ever since she began seeing me in 1983.
  • I will be happy to go into her GI system, she seems ready and anxious.
  • Patient was released to outpatient department without dressing.
  • I have suggested that he loosen his pants before standing, and then, when he stands with the help of his wife, they should fall to the floor.
  • The patient is tearful and crying constantly. She also appears to be depressed.
  • Discharge status: Alive but without permission.
  • The patient will need disposition, and therefore we will get Dr. Ward to dispose of him.
  • Healthy-appearing, decrepit 69 year old male, mentally alert but forgetful.
  • The patient refused an autopsy.
  • The patient has no past history of suicides.
  • The patient expired on the floor uneventfully.
  • Patient has left his white blood cells at another hospital.
  • Patient was becoming more demented with urinary frequency.
  • The patient’s past medical history has been remarkably insignificant with only a 40 pound weight gain in the past three days.
  • She slipped on the ice and apparently her legs went in separate directions in early December.
  • The patient experienced sudden onset of severe shortness of breath with a picture of acute pulmonary edema at home while having sex which gradually deteriorated in the emergency room.
  • The patient left the hospital feeling much better except for her original complaints.
  • The patient is disabled with a wife from Portsmouth
  • Uterus remains in place resting comfortably (after prolapse repair)
  • Diagnosis: Claus-trophobia
  • Comes to ED complaining of vaginal breathing.
  • Patient arrived by avalanche
  • Odor of alcohol on breast
  • Patient stable all morning, in asystole
  • Road Traffic Accident, back seat driver
  • The lab test indicated abnormal lover function.
  • The baby was delivered, the cord clamped and cut, and handed to the pediatrician, who breathed and cried immediately.
  • Exam of genitalia reveals that he is circus sized.
  • The skin was moist and dry.
  • Rectal exam revealed a normal size thyroid.
  • The patient had waffles for breakfast and anorexia for lunch.
  • She stated that she had been constipated for most of her life until 1989 when she got a divorce.
  • Between you and me, we ought to be able to get this lady pregnant.
  • The patient was in his usual state of good health until his airplane ran out of gas and crashed.
  • I saw your patient today, who is still under our car for physical therapy.
  • The patient was prepped and raped in the usual manner.
  • Examination reveals a well-developed male laying in bed with his family in no distress.
  • Patient was alert and unresponsive.
  • When she fainted, her eyes rolled around the room.
  • The patient lives at home with his mother, father, and pet turtle, who is presently enrolled in day care three times a week.
  • Bleeding started in the rectal area and continued all the way to Los Angeles.
  • Both breasts are equal and reactive to light and accommodation.
  • She is numb from her toes down.
  • Exam of genitalia was completely negative except for the right foot.
  • While in the emergency room, she was examined, x-rated and sent home.
  • The patient was to have a bowel resection. However, he took a job as a stockbroker instead.
  • The patient suffers from occasional, constant, infrequent headaches.
  • Coming from Detroit, this man has no children.

Eight Point Three

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Blog Directory - Blogged I have no idea how I ended up on their radar, but I’ve just been rated an 8.3 on Blogged.com, some form of directory and rating site for weblogs.

eclecticism at BloggedOur editors recently reviewed your blog and have given it an 8.3 score out of (10) in the Personal Blogs category of Blogged.com.

This is quite an achievement!

We evaluated your blog based on the following criteria: Frequency of Updates, Relevance of Content, Site Design, and Writing Style.

After carefully reviewing each of these criteria, your site was given its 8.3 score.

Well, nifty. Works for me! Guess this means I better actually keep doing something with this place, huh? ;)

My Desk with my New Toy

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My Desk with my New Toy

My Desk with my New Toy, originally uploaded by djwudi.

When Prairie asked me what I wanted for my birthday this year, I just couldn’t come up with an answer. There really wasn’t anything that was jumping to mind — I’ve got tons of music, tons of books, a good selection of work and school clothing…. We batted ideas around for a while, until I mentioned that I’d occasionally dreamed about updating my little Wacom Graphire2 (actually, I think it was an Artz, the progenitor to the Graphire line) 3.5×5 tablet.

I’ve never been a big fan of mice. In rough order from least preferred to most preferred, my choice of input device is somewhere along the lines of

TrackPoint < trackpad < mouse < trackball < tablet

Upgrading from the smaller 4×5 tablet to the larger 6×11 widescreen tablet is so nice! There’s more space to work with, so fine details are easier and more precise, and since the tablet matches the widescreen format of the screen, there’s no horizontal compression further affecting the pointer mapping. Plus, it’s quiet — which may sound odd, but between using a different material for the higher end tablets and including a better quality pen (the old pen rattles a bit), it’s gone from really quiet to near silent.

Definitely a worthwhile upgrade (and I can’t even draw, this is entirely a input device/Photoshop photo editing tool…a “real” artist would love these even more)!

Woody Allen interviews Billy Graham

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Y’know, it’s really sad that this kind of polite, civil, and amusing discourse is so rarely seen these days. Two people on very different sides of an issue who, rather than loudly proclaiming their absolute certainty that they are right and the other is wrong, are able to amiably chat and joke with each other about the differences in their viewpoints.

Part one:

Part two:

Where to Find Me in the Digital World

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It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these posts, so I figured it was worth doing it again. With the number of online sites I’m part of, sometimes it’s difficult to keep track of all the ways to find me. So here’s a current rundown as of today.

Update: Thanks to Ontario Emperor’s suggestion, I now have a FriendFeed where you can see (almost) everything I do in one swell foop. Aggregators FTW!

Read more

Justification (and oh yeah, Happy Mother’s Day)

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White carnation

White carnation, originally uploaded by play4smee.

There’s a fun little history of Mother’s Day article that Prairie found with some fun details about how it all got started…

On this 100th anniversary of Mother’s Day, the woman credited with creating one of the world’s most celebrated holidays probably wouldn’t be pleased with all the flowers, candy or gifts.

Anna Jarvis would want us to give mothers a white carnation — she felt it signified the purity of a mother’s love.

Jarvis, who never married and never had children, got the Mother’s Day idea after her mother said it would be nice if someone created a memorial to mothers.

Three years after her mother died in 1905, she organized the first official mother’s day service at a church where her mother had spent more than 20 years teaching Sunday school.

[…] West Virginia became the first state to recognize Mother’s Day in 1910. President Woodrow Wilson approved a resolution in 1914 marking the second Sunday in May a nationwide observance.

[…] Jarvis became increasingly disturbed as the celebration turned into an excuse to sell greeting cards, candy, flowers and other items.

Jarvis became known for scathing letters in which she would berate people who purchased greeting cards, saying they were too lazy to write personal letters “to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world.”

Before she died in 1948, she protested at a Mother’s Day celebration in New York, and was arrested for disturbing the peace.

[…] In the end, Mason said Jarvis was bitter about what the observance had become and “wished she would have never started the day because it became so out of control …”

“But when you look at Mother’s Day as being her baby of sorts, you can understand her protectiveness of it.”

See? My year-after-year failure to do anything big for Mother’s Day wasn’t being inconsiderate, absentminded or forgetful — I was just respecting the wishes of the woman who started the whole thing in the first place!

(Think that’ll fly?)

(Yeah, me neither.)

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom! And, of course, to any other mothers that might read or find their way here. :)

Birthday Presents!

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Birthday Presents!

Birthday Presents!, originally uploaded by djwudi.

A couple of birthday presents showed up in the mail today. Cool! Thanks to Phil for Mark Twain’s Roughing It and to Fernando for the sci-fi anthology The Starry Rift!

Happy Birthday Royce!

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Once again, we are reminded that the true celebration on this day isn’t Cinco de Mayo, but rather Royce’s birthday. Too many people get that mixed up. I have no idea why.

Applescript: iPhoto or Aperture?

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I’m experimenting with the Aperture free trial right now for photoshoots with my D70s, but I still wanted to use iPhoto for my Casio point and shoot. Apple allows you to set either iPhoto or Aperture to automatically launch when the Finder mounts a memory card, but by choosing either one, I’d have to quit and manually launch the other application depending on which camera I was importing shots from.

However, Aperture also gives you the ability to set any application to launch when a memory card is inserted. I set up this simple little Applescript (saved as a launchable app) to be the app launched on memory card insertion:

tell application "Finder"
    if exists disk "CASIO-DSC" then
        launch application "iPhoto"
    else if exists disk "NIKON D70S" then
        launch application "Aperture"
    end if
end tell

Now, whenever a memory card is inserted, the Applescript launches, checks the volume name of the memory card (which is set by the camera when you format the card), launches the appropriate photo application, and then quits.

Pretty simple for a lot of experienced Applescripters, I’m sure, but I’m pretty happy that I got it figured out.