Another stupid idea

Not that there is ever any acceptable situation for telling your wife this:

KOTA KINABALU, MALAYSIA: A husband telling his wife that she is no longer pretty in an attempt to humiliate her can be classified as an emotional violence offence if amendments are made to the Domestic Violence Act (DVA)1994.
The plan is to amend the DVA for the inclusion of a clause on emotional violence against women.
Currently, they are only protected only against physical abuse, Women's Development Department director-general Datuk Dr Noorul Ainur Mohd Nur said.
She said on Wednesday that the aim for proposing the amendment was to safeguard women both physically and emotionally.
Dr Noorul said emotional violence was a form of abuse that would deeply scar a woman and lower their self-esteem, dignity and self-confidence.

But this really takes the cake. Previously, it was only the men in the gomen sector that was coming up with chauvinistic and totally demented ideas (ie "don't hire pretty women because they are the root of all evil") but it looks like some women are getting back at them.

I guess if you populate Malaysia with offspring of our brainless politicians, you end up with all women as housewives and homemakers (ie you are made to hire only 'ugly women', and if you can't call anyone ugly, I guess you end up not being able to hire any females at all?).

(PS this is a man in drag)

Personally I think anyone rude and dumb enough to tell his wife she isn't pretty anymore deserves to be castrated and have his gonads fed to hungry turtles; but to make this illegal? Sounds like a waste of politicians' time to me. Or perhaps they DO have too much time on their hands.

Hypocrisy is:

Getting caught by your diabetes educator while sneaking off to the cafeteria for a donut in-between your diabetes patients...

Things I wish I knew before medical school

1. The learning NEVER stops. I spent 12 years in medschool, residency, fellowship. Now, I'm still trying to keep up with CMEs and journals.
2. Medical school is only the first, baby step. There's a long way to go after that (if someone had told me that training would take 12 years, I'd tell them to go straight to hell, and went into male prostitution).
3. Medicine will forever, irreversibly, mess up your sleep. I thought of this Sunday when I woke up, wide awake, at 6.30 am and started my day.
4. Despite what mom says, being a doctor don't mean a long line of women waiting for you (unless you're an OB/GYN) (Luckily for me, I found one, and what a woman she is)
5. The more you subspecialize, the less you know.
6. Being a naive first year medstudent in 1996, I thought someday I'd look like Dr. Doug Ross, with his white coat flapping behind him like some superhero cape. To the present and reality: I neither look, walk, talk like, and am nowhere as successful as George Clooney. And that thing flapping behind me is probably a piece of toilet paper stuck to my shoe.
7. There is absolutely nothing cool about wearing a pager and being on call. The adrenaline rush is over-rated.
8. The number of strands of hair remaining on your head will be inversely proportional to the number of years of training you undergo (tip: don't specialize).

An Obituary

This one goes out to Mr. N.

I had known him only the last month; an internist asked me to see him in consultation. The internist wanted me to treat him before he would clear the patient for elective knee surgery. And such, he was anxious to get the green light- the pain from the arthritis was causing him significant distress.

I felt guilty being the specialist to hold things up; I knew he was in pain, and he wanted to get things fixed as soon as possible. When I saw him 3 weeks ago, I was almost apologetic telling him the tests I ordered may take a week to come back.

"Don't worry about it; I know it's not your fault. You have to do what you have to do. Besides, I can handle the pain."

He asked if I was religious.

"I believe things happen for a reason; the Lord will make things happen when they are ready. And the Lord will decide when my time is up."

I called him last Friday to update him of a test result, and suggested he comes in Wednesday for a confirmatory test.

He never shows up for the lab appointment, so I called him at the end of my day yesterday. A man answers the phone:

"Bill passed away in his sleep this morning..."

This hit me like a brick; I was shocked beyond words. I offered my condolences to his brother, and left my number in case there was something I could do. And said a little prayer for Mr. N; at least he's pain free now. At least he's Home.

Farewell, Mr. N. It was my honor to have known you, and to have experienced your optimism and your faith. The Lord did decide it was your time. Rest in peace.

Star Trek

I watched Star Trek today.

Okay, I'm the first to admit; I'm a hopeless trekkie. Like the millions of other nerds out there, I can tell you the ship serial number of the Enterprise. I can tell you what Capt. Kirk's middle name is. And who can forget, the Vulcan Live Long and Prosper hand sign. And so I'm pretty easy to please. I'll probably just be as happy watching Capt. Kirk ride a pile of dogshit and doing hand puppets, just as long as it's a Star Trek show, and so my opinions are probably biased.

But man, was that a great movie or what??? Granted, the wormhole/alternate universe thing was giving me a headache, and I thought the part about Kirk getting his post seemed implausible. But still, as a Star Trek movie, this had a lot more seat-gripping action than I expected. And that thing between Uhura and Spock was a bit surprising, though I think they pulled it off quite well. And though I thought John Cho played Sulu's part really well, I have to say it's hard to see him in any other role after the Harold and Kumar series.

One down, more to go. X-men, G.I. Joe, Angels and Demons, Terminator, Transformers. This is going to be a pretty exciting season...

I came home giddy with excitement the other day. J was a 20 year old woman with type 1 diabetes. She was one of my first type 1 patients here when I joined the practice. At that time, things were a mess; her hemoglobin A1c was 11.2%. School and work kept getting in the way, and so she neglected her health. She was sent to me because she was also pregnant for the first time.
An eminent professor whose talks I’ve attended once said, you can get (almost) any mother to do anything if it means a healthy baby. That is very true- it’s easy to neglect our health if it didn’t involve anyone else. But take a mother, carrying her child, her flesh and blood, in her womb, her cocoon of safety, a mother would do anything.
In this case, it meant checking her glucose at least 4 times a day. 4 shots of insulin daily. Learning how to carb count, and adjust. Watching her diet. And even more challenging for this single mother, still at school.

Through it all, she persevered. Yes, she struggled, despite the frustrations, despite the brittle numbers as often seen in patients with type 1, and then with the increasing insulin needs because of the insulin resistance effects of gestation.

When I saw her, she was 9 days away from a planned induction. The OB has been pretty happy with the progress so far. No sign of macrosomia. And I proudly showed her her latest hemoglobin A1c: 6.5%.

Yes, my nurse and I were pretty excited for J; we feel like we have shared a significant part of this journey with her, not surprising since she has been coming in to see me monthly, and has been sending her logs to be every fortnight, just because of the high risk nature.

I hope she'll do well. And I hope she'll continue to do well postpartum, and not fall off the wagon after she delivers.

A Home Project

One of our projects this season is landscaping. After all, our property sits on 9990 sq feet of nothingness. Aside from the grass and the 'decorative brown rocks' our dog leaves on our yard, there isn't anything remotely interesting or pretty to look at. That's pretty much it.

So we saved for months and finally decided it was time. We got a landscaper to come and put in something we've always wanted; a stone patio and firepit in the back yard.

Voila! After anxiously watching their progress for the last week, it's finally done. We're just waiting for a nice, dry weekend to have our first campfire.