Green and White

I've moved into a nice little room in Durham, North Carolina. I'm about one hundred yards away from the plot of land where our future townhouse will be built. Though it gets depressingly dark at night, this city is magnificent during the day. The buildings are among the most beautiful I've ever seen, and the hospital is directly adjacent to the undergraduate campus. Better yet, the entire city is full of little dining dives and farmers markets. There is even a Duke Farmers Market in the middle of the hospital where people can pick up locally grown produce on their way home from work. I was even more impressed with their local farmers Mobile Market Program where you can participate by buying a "subscription" to local farms, and the farmers will bring you a weekly crate of spoils from your share of the land be it flowers, melons, berries or vegetables, oh my!

This whole state screams, "GREEN" and really represents the word locovore which, incidentally, was Oxford Dictionary's Word of the Year in 2007...

One huge perk is the Duke Hospital Graduate Medical Education Office which is connected to all the outpatient clinics. There is a room where residents are not only told but encouraged to walk in and take whatever kind of refreshments they want. Without any embellishment, amongst the baskets of candy and gum, there is a fruit basket with apples, bananas, pears and peaches that I've been digging my grubby little fingers through every day I've been at the hospital.

The most satisfying moment of the week took place at the Duke Medical Bookstore. I was given a sheet of paper and told to pick up my allotment of white coats for the next year. I had heard some horror stories about how certain departments at MGH and Duke make their interns wear painfully short white coats with tight white pants. I handed the clerk my paperwork and he told me to go over and pick out 4 long white coats. I didn't think much of the scene until a guy walks in the store. He was something close to 6'4" and 230 lbs. He told the clerk in a thick manly voice that he was "general surgery" and the guy mockingly said to him him that "the short white coats are over there, and the white pants are over there." I'm pretty sure everyone in the store heard me laugh.

There's a team building retreat that I'm supposed to go to tomorrow. I'm very curious to see what happens at a residency program team building retreat. How incredibly progressive of them...

Doomsday

There are five days left. Make it stop.

Point!

Jason: Read this. [points to a title of a website]
Jenny: [reading] Oh. That's interesting.
Jason: It's supposed to be a joke.
Jenny: Oh.
Jason: Haha, you're so gullible. Did you know you spell gullible with an 'A'?
Jenny: [sounding out] gull...a...b.... no they don't!
Jason: Hahahhahahaa.

Classic.

Mr. Dallas Robinson

1. Read this link.

2. Watch this video.

The Real Housewives of New York City

...makes me feel ill.

Simple Summer Asparagus

Prep time:
8 minutes, 100% attended

Ingredients:
1 bunch of the thickest asparagus you can find
Fresh mozzarella
Fresh basil
Olive oil
Kosher salt
Cracked pepper

Directions:
1. Trim the ends off the asparagus. Using a sharp vegetable peeler, skin 3 stalks of asparagus per person.

2. Boil the asparagus for a strict 90 seconds. Transfer the asparagus to a large bowl of ice water to stop the cooking process. Pat the asparagus dry with a towel and move to serving plate.

3. Top every 3 stalks of asparagus with 1 slice of mozzarella. Add olive oil, kosher salt, cracked pepper and chopped basil to taste.

What?

Hahaha.

Blind Irishman sees with the aid of son's tooth in his eye
DUBLIN (AFP) - An Irishman blinded by an explosion two years ago has had his sight restored after doctors inserted his son's tooth in his eye, he said on Wednesday.

Bob McNichol, 57, from County Mayo in the west of the country, lost his sight in a freak accident when red-hot liquid aluminium exploded at a re-cycling business in November 2005.

"I thought that I was going to be blind for the rest of my life," McNichol told RTE state radio.

After doctors in Ireland said there was nothing more they could do, McNichol heard about a miracle operation called Osteo-Odonto-Keratoprosthesis (OOKP) being performed by Dr Christopher Liu at the Sussex Eye Hospital in Brighton in England.

The technique, pioneered in Italy in the 1960s, involves creating a support for an artificial cornea from the patient's own tooth and the surrounding bone.

The procedure used on McNichol involved his son Robert, 23, donating a tooth, its root and part of the jaw.

McNichol's right eye socket was rebuilt, part of the tooth inserted and a lens inserted in a hole drilled in the tooth.

The first operation lasted ten hours and the second five hours.

"It is pretty heavy going," McNichol said. "There was a 65 percent chance of me getting any sight.

"Now I have enough sight for me to get around and I can watch television. I have come out from complete darkness to be able to do simple things," McNichol said.

On Doctoring

Now, I doubt that anything I've ever done in or outside of a hospital has ever saved a life. But I think that if I ever did, my head would probably explode. Maybe it's better this way.

The Good Old Days

Suppose the end was now the start
final breaths and graying heart
pulling time from empty thought
time in wrinkles of a final cot
slow thoughts, slow motions, slow words to speak
full but mild, funny but meek
it has been said, "get it over with, my life’s past"
Aha! maybe you saved the best for last

Suppose then, you meet your match
holding wise years, riding laughs with spritely fun
the Angry Silence, always full
of Love and spite, used like a tool
talking fast, thinking faster and then
you bid farewell
an immature goodbye
naïve
sweet and flirtatious
pleasant
awkward, better than death?

Suppose then, a homecoming
to a place where pride and conflict
tug at comfort and peace
immaturity is lazy’s king
every day a fanciful fling

suppose now an infants cry
world around, watching you lie

suppose then you became so small
forever gone, thoughts and all