Much safer

Hatchling

What is a war?

PTR

A war is what happens when army people from two different lands get together and fight each other, usually because they are having an argument about something.

Hatchling

So they fight with swords?

PTR

In the Olden Days they fought with swords, but now they use guns.

Hatchling

That is good, because swords are very pointy and you might accidentally hurt someone.

Fresh out of ice-cream

An anonymous commenter on my previous post made me wonder if there is any documentary evidence of zombie Lego Friends with hypercholesterolaemia having fought in the Vietnam war. Perspicacity such as this can't be ignored, so I scoured the classified microfiche banks in my basement and discovered this picture.

The thicket in the background places the subject probably somewhere around the Mekong delta. The rifle is an M14, dating the picture to roughly 1965-67, unless the zombie Lego Friend was serving in the US Marines or Army Engineers, in which case it could date to as late as 1974.

As you can see, the zombie Lego Friend is carrying a large  supply of fish oil, known to help lower elevated triglycerides. While elevated triglycerides are not a typical feature of familial hypercholesterolaemia, it's better to be safe than sorry.

Finally, whilst it is impossible to definitively identify which zombie Lego Friend this is, the style and colour of the remnants of hair strongly suggest that this could be the undead form of Olivia, previously known primarily for her mobile ice-cream shop, powered by bicycle.

No doubt she roams the delta still.

This week I have been mostly thinking about

It's all Welsh to me

Had a med student trail me around for a few hours this evening.  He seemed like a decent guy, in that he was interested in discussing things other than medicine.  As a result, when he asked me to sign his "attendance book" (to prove that he bothered to turn up, a program probably instigated as a direct result of students like me who took the university's unofficial slogan of "Teach Yourself Medicine" rather too literally), I wrote some feedback in there to the effect that I thought his pronunciation was excellent and that I appreciated his willingness to contribute anecdotes from his extensive and esoteric background knowledge.

We had this strange conversation where somehow he ended up explaining the etymology of the word "dysdiadokinesia" to me.  Because it relates to Alexander the Great and his successors, I ended up talking to him about Ptolemy, and because that sounds vaguely like Potomac we ended up talking about the American civil war and Washington crossing the Delaware river.

Interestingly, when I got home I attempted to verify the etymology of dysdiadokinesia and found it less easy than I expected.  I ended up trying to use Google Translate to translate the word "diadochos" from Greek into English, but Google insisted that "diadochos" is actually Welsh.  Welsh for "diadochos" in fact.  However did we live before Google?

So then I tried translating "diadochos" from Welsh into Greek, and got "Διάδοχος", which I then translated back into English and got "successor".  The Diadochi were indeed the Macedonian successors of Alexander the Great, like Ptolemy (who ruled in Egypt).

But I'm still not so clear on what that has to do with dysdiadokinesia.  Oh well.

Reading is hell

In between lurching from day to day as a hospital intern, raising a small child, and smothering my rage so as not to commit chargeable offences on this blog, I've not had time for much reading.  I used to get through a book every fortnight or so on average, even during med school when I probably should have been reading rather more about sick people than I actually did.

As a result I haven't updated the Bookshelf page of this blog for quite some time.  I'm sure that the more literary minded of you have been salivating at the thought of an update, and I'm equally sure that only one or two of you have ever actually noticed the Bookshelf page of this blog. 

Regardless of your level of interest, I'm going to bang on about reading for a bit, for a couple of reasons.  First, I'm sitting here in front of a computer on a cover shift with not much happening so far, so I've got the itchy fingers, and second, I've noticed some interesting trends in my reading.

Normally my reading tastes run to:

• literary fiction
• vintage sci-fi
• historical non-fiction
• scientific non-fiction

Now what I've noticed is that when my stress levels ramp up, the literary fiction is the first thing to go.  All that cortisol must shut down my frontal lobes.  After a while the scientific non-fiction goes too, followed soon after by the historical non-fiction as my brain withers and dies under the relentless assault of my unhinged amygdala.  All that's left is vintage sci-fi, and even that warps and mutates into a desire to read really awful genre fantasy.  Ugh.

But given long enough, even the bad genre fantasy goes away, and historical fiction rears its head again - but in a very specific way.  I get magnetically drawn to personal memoirs of people who've had really really traumatic experiences, mostly to do with getting shot at.

I think the protective mechanism at work here is an underlying desire to put my life in perspective.  Sure, I may have to attend multiple Code Blues in the middle of the night but at least I don't have to see the tortured corpse of my best friend as in Flags Of Our Fathers.  I may feel burdened by being called to assess yet another asymptomatic hypotension, but that's preferable to having to pretend to be dead while my pockets are looted by the enemy and bullets are fired into the heads of my injured comrades around me, as in We Were Soldiers Once, And Young.  And sometimes I rile at the selfishness and insensitivity of my seniors at work - but at least I'm not being systematically hunted down and exterminated by the State, as in The Pianist.

The good news is that phase of my life seems to be over.  I've recently been able to start reading scientific non-fiction again, with Oliver Sacks' Seeing Voices - a book about Deafness, Sign and language.  Prior to that I read Naval Warfare In The Age Of Sail and learned to distinguish a sloop from a brig.  Soon I might be able to crack open that Anna Funder book I've been sitting on since April.

Here's hoping!