Cheap Date

Students have a Cheap Date @ the Angelika!!!!!!!

Every Monday, students get a FREE Large Popcorn & FREE Large Soda, upon presentation of valid student ID at the Box Office. We also have a student price of $6.00 per ticket for all shows during the week (not just Mondays). FREE Large Popcorn/Soda offer only good with purchase of film ticket on Mondays.

Woo! So my friend "Basia" and I are going to go see "Pride and Prejudice" this evening, no boys invited.

Also, I may have to go see Harry Potter 4 this weekend... AT THE IMAX!!!! I am a superdork! But how awesome, to watch the dragons and the school champions at the fucking IMAX!!! Yay!

Good stuff.

I'm currently re-reading The House of God. I'm always amazed at how much more relevant it gets the more medicine I know. For those of you who've never read it, it's not a book about Jesus, it's a book about a medical intern in a Jewish hospital called "House of God", a thinly disguised Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital, affiliated with the "Best Medical School (BMS)", a thinly disguised Harvard. Roy, our hero, is subjected to inhumane call schedules, inhuman residents, and a system of LAWS such as #1: Gomers don't die. GOMER = Get Out of My Emergency Room, referring to an elderly person who is senile, demented, and basically lacking that which makes a person. There are moments when this book makes me laugh out loud, just totally crack up, like when they ask gomertose Mr. Rokitansky, from the Orthopaedic height of his adjustable bed, if there's anything else he'd like to say, and he says yeah, and they wait for it, and he says "KEEP THE LOWDOWN LOW." Hilarious! Plus, there are super-raunchy sex scenes, which are not so relevant but always entertaining.

This book was written in 1978 and it is still so amazingly powerful. Doctors now bitch and moan all day about the 80-hour resident work-week. I've heard reasoning like "these residents are just lazy", "they won't learn how to practice medicine", or "it interferes with patient care". What they don't acknowledge is that working >80 hours a week is fucking BRUTAL, and that the only reason they want residents to go back to that is because they went through it, so everyone else should suffer too. Maybe building more medical schools and educating more people to be doctors, earning a little less $$ but killing fewer patients would be a good idea. One reason there is a huge influx of people entering nurse practitioner, physician's assistant or nurse anesthetist type fields is because there are spots to be filled. Since the market can't create more doctors, as medical schools must be built and licensed by the government, the market will create more doctor-like positions. Psychologists push for the right to prescribe medication because psychiatrists are hard to come by and extremely expensive. At my school's counseling center, the psychiatrist is available from 9-noon, Friday mornings ONLY. For several thousand students, this is the only psychiatrist available at the school. Unless you're an inpatient at a psych hospital, you're not very likely to see a psychiatrist; instead, you're more likely to get your SSRI's from your family doctor, who may not know very much about them. Family docs are not trained to counsel, as psychiatrists are (but mostly don't do). If, like me, you believe in dual therapy, with SSRI's and counseling, you end up seeing two doctors: the psychiatrist to deal the drugs, and the therapist to mop up the tears.

Gah, why did I get off on this tangent?? I am still stinky from gross lab, I have to shower and eat dinner, and get to cheap date night!!!