Ed’s corner of the web

What a crazy few weeks it’s been.  For those of you who know me personally (and I think almost everyone who reads this blog does), you know that we are in the throes of a tricky move.  Moving is enough of a pain when it’s uncomplicated.  But for this move, we’ve had a six-week gap of homelessness to fill.  The lease at our old apartment ran out on 7/31, and our landlady refused/was unable to give us an extension to get us to our condo closing date on 9/14.  If it was two weeks, we could’ve crashed on couches of local friends.  But a six week term left us no alternative but to find some kind of temporary housing.   Not wanting to move into a place and then move again in six weeks, we planned on putting the vast majority of our stuff into storage, finding a furnished apartment, and living out of suitcases until we moved into our condo.

The first part was easy - thank you Gentle Giant.  The second part, though, was an unanticipated complete pain-in-the-butt.  Having two cats whittled down the number of available places considerably.  Not wanting to pay over $3000/month in rent whittled it down considerably more.  I went online to try to find prospects.  Craigslist was mildly productive, but nothing fit our needs.  I reluctantly paid for access to Sublet.com and found their listings to be both skimpy and completely out of date - worthless and a rip-off.  An online site designed to help people on sabattical find housing gave me a couple email addresses, but nobody replied.  I finally thought I had found a place right in the Back Bay, but the realtor I dealt with there was the most flaky, impossible-to-reach, unprofessional, non-committal person in that industry I have ever had the misfortune of working with.  As you can probably guess, that fell through.  After a couple stressful days where I made sure our tent and sleeping bags were in good order, I managed to grab a little one-bedroom furnished apartment in Allston in a place that specializes in short term furnished rentals.  Whew!

After a lot of packing, cleaning, heavy lifting, cursing, and unpacking, we’re now more or less settled in our temporary digs in Allston.  It ain’t the Ritz, but it’ll work for the next several weeks.  We’ve already enjoyed exploring some of the great ethnic eats in Allston and are looking forward to more yummy food in the weeks ahead.  Carisa has also taken a great liking to the gas stove, which enables us to have the wild luxury of multiple pots cooking at once.  You have to realize that on our old derelict electric stovetop, we had four burners, only three of which worked and only one of which was full-sized.  When you put a normal-sized pan on that one full-sized burner, you couldn’t fit anything else on the other burners.  And as it was, that one full-sized burner was tilted enough to prevent any more than a fraction of the pan from coming into contact with it.  We weren’t channeling Julia Child so much as Lewis and Clark.  And don’t even get us started on the oven.

So it’s been a crazy and stressful last few weeks, but we now have a little lull before moving into our real home.  The last few weeks haven’t been altogether unenjoyable, either.  We got to see Shakespeare on the Common (at least until the second act got rained out), we’ve been out picking wild blueberries, Carisa’s mother and sister visited, and we even got to eat at L’Espalier while it was still at Gloucester St.  I had no home internet access for a while, which was actually delightfully liberating, but now I’m able to blog again with abandon on my laptop.  Apologies to those of who missed seeing more frequent updates (all 2 or 3 of you).  I didn’t get sick or go on vacation, although I think a vacation sounds like just the thing right now!

Carisa and I had the pleasure this last Saturday of attending the wedding celebration of Mary Ly and Chin Song. We knew Mary from the Korean language classes we took through the Brookline Center for Adult Education, and we were happy for her, if a little sad to see her off to the West Coast.

I had brought my camera along in hopes of adding some interesting angles or framings of the wedding, but I soon found my efforts to be completely unnecessary. There were two photographers, two videographers, and even a lady running around carrying a slave flash on a pole. Far from adding anything to the photos, I had to throw elbows to even get the few snapshots I did. And even when I wasn’t fighting for physical space, I had to deal with errant flashes and video camera lights messing up my metering and white balance (you can see the cool bluish light from a video camera in the picture above).

Failed attempts at photography aside, we had a great time. The reception was at Jin Asian Restaurant, a monolith of a restaurant rising above Route 1 in Saugas like some mythical Chinese palace. The meal was ten courses and almost solid protein - cold cuts, mixed seafood, lobster, chicken, fish. My personal trainer would’ve been happy for me. We didn’t even see carbohydrate until the ninth course. The first plate appeared a little after seven, and we finally finished with cake at around 10:30. It was a very filling meal.

Intermixed with the steady stream - river, really - of food were games, toasts, dances, cake cutting, speeches in three languages, and a slideshow. Mary had two costume changes. Chin (who is Korean) made a game attempt at a speech in Vietnamese. Mary (who is Vietnamese) whipped out some perfectly-inflected Korean that made my jaw drop to the floor. When Carisa and I finally rolled out of the parking lot of the restaurant, we knew that we had never seen a wedding like this, and we felt very lucky to have had the opportunity. So thanks to Mary and Chin for throwing a great party, and best of luck to the two of you as you depart on your grand adventure.

Other photos from the wedding.

Carisa and I went to see the new Indiana Jones movie last Friday.  Meh.  While it was not quite the childhood-ruining, franchise-destroying crap that Episode I was, there were no terribly redeeming traits about it, either.  (Spoiler alert!)  Returning a crystal skull to a hidden temple in the jungles of South America at least sounds like a cool plot on the surface - but when you mix in nuclear testing, commentary on McCarthyism,  alien coverup conspiracies, and cute CG animals, the idea sort of gets lost in all the noise.

The Indy franchise has always had a gritty flavor, so the hyper-real CGI liberally sprinkled throughout the movie feels contrived and out of place.  What was supposed to be a breathless action sequence gets ruined by Shia Lebouf going Tarzan through a CG forest with an army of CG monkeys.  Yes, an army of CG monkeys.  Might as well be Ewoks.  I didn’t even mention the CG prairie dogs.

Cate Blanchett is underused but is still ten times more memorable than Indy’s sidekick, for whom you hardly care when he gets sucked into another dimension.  (Seriously, another dimension.  Is this still Indiana Jones?)  The batty, nearly aphasic kidnapped archaeologist adds nothing to the story.  At least it was good to see Karen Allen as Marion Ravenwood again.

Oh yeah - the movie ends in a wedding.  Honestly, as I continue to type this stuff, I have to remind myself over and over that this really was an Indiana Jones movie.

I could go on and on, but I guess it really doesn’t matter.  The movie is going to make (and already has made) a jillion dollars.  People are going to go see it regardless of what the reviews are (just like I did) because of the history of the franchise.  I know that sequels don’t automatically have to suck, because there have been examples of ones done well (immediate example: Temple of Doom).  So I free up 2+ hours of my time and pay 12 bucks to go into a movie like this hoping, perhaps naively, for something that enriches an entire franchise’s mythology, adds to the magic of a fictional world.  And it hurts when, more times than not, the expectations come crashing down and the movie ends up sucking.  You wonder if the people in charge are just asleep at the wheel, if they made the mistake of taking themselves too seriously, or if they’re just turning the crank to print some money.  In any case it’s a damn shame.

Ok - lament over.  I hear Iron Man is pretty good.

Let me set the record straight first: I’m a huge NPR fan.  I think I first got hooked around 9/11, and I’ve been an avid listener ever since.  Of the six preset stations on the car radio, the other five combined don’t get half as much playtime as NPR, which in my neck of the woods is 90.9 WBUR.  I enjoy the high-quality reporting, the engaging interviews, and even the fun weekend shows like Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me.  I enjoy the whole affair so much that a couple years ago, I felt bad being a freeloader and started making yearly contributions.  And beyond simple enjoyment, I also find myself learning a lot from listening.  It’s become a significant and trusted source of information for me.

You can imagine my consternation, then, when a couple weeks ago my morning commute with WBUR was interrupted by an ad for a company providing ”detoxifying” services with “ionic energy fields”, oxygen supplementation, and nutrient supplementation.  I won’t give the name here for fear of upping the company’s notoriety somehow.  It was a rude, jarring, pseudoscientific intrusion into what was typically a very informative drive.  How could WBUR advertise this crap?  I knew they needed sponsors, as any public radio station does, but surely this was bending too low.

I almost blogged about my dismay that day, but work soon had me running around enough to forget that morning’s insult.  My wedding and honeymoon came and went shortly thereafter, and I returned to my happy NPR listening habits, past injuries forgotten.

Until today.

I’m driving up Route 2 towards Concord, enjoying ”Only a Game”.  The usual WBUR sponsor bit comes on, but this time instead of Landry and Arcari or the MFA, the nice female radio voice spits out the name of a school of homeopathy!  Let me say that again - homeopathy.  You have got to be kidding me.  What’s next - sponsorship from a Boston psychics organization?  Noni juice manufacturers?  WBUR already broadcasts Science Friday.  Maybe they should add Woo Wednesday to attract more sponsors.

So I’m calling out WBUR on this one, and I hope others do, as well.  And remember, WBUR, it’s only because I love you.  I know public radio money is not exactly overflowing, but there have to be some standards on who it’s ok to take money from.  Those who make their living duping their customers with potentially harmful pseudoscience should not be given the opportunity to spread their message on stations such as WBUR, stations that exist to educate and provide information.

After an almost two-month hiatus, I’m taking another plunge with the blog.  I’ll admit, I was this close to giving up on it entirely.  It wasn’t the writing requirements, it was the incessant blog spam.  Tramadol.  Soma.  Phentermine.  It got to be too much to keep up with in late March/early April, so I stopped blogging entirely to see if anything changed.  The spam still kept flowing into my moderation list for a couple weeks, but then it seemed to taper off a bit.  A couple days ago, I returned from being out of the country for two weeks (more on that later), and what am I greeted by but - amazingly - no additional spam!  So I have a little hope now that maybe this little blog has fallen off the radar of the zombie comment spam engines.  Anyone know how to avoid this crap?  I enjoy blogging and would like to continue doing it, but if it means sifting daily through the mountain of spam I was getting before, then I honestly won’t be able to justify the time.  So anyway, here goes again…

I blogged about this story when it first came up back in August.  I knew it was going to be bad news, and sure enough, it is.  Now the surgeon is facing criminal charges - three felony counts, at that.  Dependent adult abuse, administering a harmful substance, and unlawful controlled substance prescription are the criminal counts, and on top of that there’s the wrongful death suit from the mother.  While it seems pretty apparent that this surgeon crossed over some ethical boundaries, the weight of the criminal charges seems a little hefty to me.  I wish I knew more of the facts of the case.  Don’t get me wrong - the surgeon committed some rather egregious errors and should be firmly sanctioned for them, but I don’t think his overzealousness to help someone else should land him in prison.  Of course, the damage to the transplant community has been done and will likely only spread over the next couple years as this case plays out.  That is probably the biggest loss of all.

I knew that there was a lunar eclipse that was supposed to happen, but I wasn’t sure I’d be able to see it from my Boston apartment. Still, when 10 pm rolled around, I walked outside, looked straight up, and was pleasantly surprised to see this:

I ran upstairs, grabbed my camera, and grabbed a few shots.  I had only seen one lunar eclipse previously, one summer night many years ago when I lived in Michigan.  I was excited to see one again.  I even dragged Carisa downstairs in her pajamas to see it, and she appreciated the sight nonetheless.  Astronomical events like this make me want to get a place out in the boonies and shoot cool pictures of the sky all night.  Maybe someday.

Every now and then I’m asked to cover a local solo pediatrics practice for a day or two. As a hospitalist, I have to dust off my primary care cap before I go in. I have to admit, I find it challenging. I deal with sick - sometimes very sick - kids on a daily basis as a hospitalist. While the kids aren’t (usually) as sick in primary care clinic, the pace is unrelenting. I barely have time to think before I have to run and see the next patient double-booked into a 15-minute slot. Fortunately, there is often not a ton of thinking involved, as a primary care pediatrics practice in winter involves a lot of runny noses and earaches. For those patients that require a little more thought than a simple cold, though, the stress level amps up. At least as a hospitalist I can pause between patients to look up an article or refresh my memory about a drug dose. In primary care clinic, I’m backed up 45 minutes and 6 patients if I so much as stop to pee. The challenge, then, becomes one of providing good, thoughtful, compassionate care in a time-limited setting.  Some days I do better than others.  I know I couldn’t do it for a career, but that makes me appreciate all the more those that do.  So to all you overworked, frazzled, brilliant primary care pediatricians out there, I tip my hat to all of you.

Man - I was doing so well, too.

A not insignificant portion of my pediatric practice is doing small procedures - blood draws, IV’s, lumbar punctures, etc.  Some of these - like lumbar puctures - go straight to me, while more routine procedures like blood draws usually go through nursing first.  Only when nursing has had their shot does the buck get passed to me.  Recently I had been on a bit of a roll with these little procedures.  It had been a long time since I hadn’t been able to get an IV, and my lumbar punctures had been single-shot affairs going way back.  Now I knew intellectually that this was just the vagaries of chance and probability, and that this streak would all come screeching to a halt soon.  But I was proud of myself nevertheless, and I allowed myself the luxury of enjoying the streak.  Just like the basket seems bigger to a shooter who’s on a roll, those little baby veins looked like huge pipes, and I almost felt I could do an LP blindfolded.

Then last week I flub two shots at what should have been a not particularly difficult IV.  Then on my last shift I get nothing but blood on three attempts at an LP.  Damn damn damn.  I feel like I’m an intern again.  Just like the basketball player, I know intellectually that I have to keep on shooting for the slump to pass, but I’d be lying if I said that those last procedures wouldn’t be on my mind when I’m doing my next ones.

I kicked off this wedding season with the nuptials of Tom Alexander and Laura Crotty this last weekend (which also prevented my blogging). I say wedding season because from now until August, I have a total of five weddings to attend, including my own. Crazy.

Tom and Laura are friends of mine from med school. Tom’s finishing up an ENT residency out in UCSD, and Laura recently ditched us here in Boston (sniff!) to be with Tom and finish her pulmonary fellowship on the west coast. Several other Dukies were invited to the wedding, not to mention a couple who were even in the wedding party, so I was looking forward to the weekend a lot.

The weekend did not disappoint. The festivities were all in La Jolla, which I had not had the pleasure of visiting before. Our little reunion group had a great time strolling the city, walking at the water’s edge, and trying out a few of the numerous restaurants. Tom and Laura had also been considerate enough to keep everything very localized; Carisa and I were able to get a room right in town and walk to both the wedding and the reception.

The wedding took place in Cuvier Park, right overlooking the ocean.

It being a public park, we attracted quite the peanut gallery.

I just like this photo.

See the rest of my meager photos here.

The ceremony location was beautiful, the bride and groom looked great, and everyone had a wonderful time at the reception. It was a great wedding. Congrats to Tom and Laura, best of luck for all your years ahead, and we look forward to seeing you again soon.