Wonkette on Cheney's Asia Trip

I almost choked when I read this: So That's Why Cheney Won't Return To America ... The article itself is also hilarious.

Enough procastinating! Time to get back to work!

Hives of another kind

Another picture of a building in my neighborhood that was recently taken down.

In today's New York Times, there's an article about vanishing honeybee colonies. Apparently, for reasons that are still elusive, bees just aren't coming back to their hives. This has great economic consequences, as many crops (up to 1/3) are pollinated by commercial hives.

Wikipedia's article on honeybees is full of fascinating tidbits. I didn't realize, for example, that honeybees were imported to the Americas by European settlers, and that wild swarms are actually "feral". Native Americans called the honeybee "the white man's fly". It's not clear to me whether there were any bees before Europeans got here.

In my back yard, come spring, I find bees, praying mantises, crickets, caterpillars and various unmentionable insects and animals. This little slice of nature in the middle of the city comforts me, but I wonder how many of the species are non-native. Does it matter?

city life

Continuity Clinic, Part 1

My next patients are from one of my favorite families. The mother is in her early 20s, with three children and another on the way. Despite her youth she is fiercely maternal, round and protective. Today I see the oldest, a five-year-old girl, and her two-year-old brother; the three-year-old girl is scheduled for next week, but she’s here, too.

There are no medical concerns about the oldest child, but her mother asks me about her behavior. Since her grandmother died last summer, she’s changed. More attitude, more moodiness. The girl’s mother is worried that she is still grieving for her grandmother. What should she do?

Turns out that with the death of her grandmother, the family has moved in with the mother’s new boyfriend, and that it’s now clear that mother and father won’t be getting back together. The father is still involved, but the girl sees him less and less. The mother is frankly overwhelmed by the three children, and, although she loves babies, is terrified about adding another child to the mix. In past visits we’ve talked about enormous energy bills and evictions. I don’t ask, but wonder, how the family is supporting itself. She doesn’t work and welfare is no longer generous.

One of the reasons we go into medicine, spend four years of college grubbing for A’s, waste our youth in more school and training, is that we love to solve problems. We are fixers of people. But how can I fix this?

How do you deal with a mother who has labeled her two year old as “bad” because he likes to get into things? Even the five year old says he is a “bad boy”. The three-year-old girl is also “bad”, but she climbs into my lap and wants to use my stethoscope. She draws me a picture and is touched when I take it. Where can I even begin?

I have 15 minutes to cover these questions, explain the ever-expanding list of immunizations, examine her, do developmental screening, and counsel about safety and reading. How could I possibly begin to talk about how she might be reacting to having a new stepfather? Explain how the mother should deal with it? Counsel her on how to deal with moodiness?

So I tell her that she should try to ignore the attitude, and should focus on the priority behaviors, that she and the boyfriend should both take individual “special” time out to spend with the child, that they should “catch her being good”. I ask the social worker to meet with the child to explore the question of grief. Reading this you may get the wrong idea about my methods. You may think that when I say I told her to focus on priority behaviors, I spent time coming to an understanding of what things were important to the mother, using what I learned to tailor the advice. That I spent time demonstrating what “catching her being good” means, that I probed the intricacies of the mother-boyfriend-father relationship. You would be wrong. All of my schooling, personal growth seminars, volunteer workshops, supervision, and reading have given me the right catch phrases. But any observer could see the distance between my words and her life.

I know this, and I don’t know how to change it. And I have to get to my next patient, and this family’s ride is almost here.

Snow Days

The snow has finally come, and, as usual, it is a case of be careful what you wish for. Snow brings snow days, which bring sledding, which bring every kind of injury you can imagine. Sledding into cars, being run over by cars, hitting trees, lacerating legs, fracturing skulls and many other bones; the list really is endless. The snow days also seem to lead to scalding injuries (hot chocolate, soup, etc.) and dog bites.


*This picture is actually from last year, as I haven't had much time to be outside taking pictures.

Baby, Let Me Follow You Down

Until I read this remembrance by David Hajdu, I didn’t know that Eric Von Schmidt had died. Mostly I know him from his influence on Bob Dylan, who says on his first album that he met him in the "green pastures of Harvard university". According to Dylan (at least in 1969), “He could sing the bird off the wire and the rubber off the tire, He can separate the men from the boys and the note from the noise. The bridle from the saddle and the cow from the cattle. He can play the tune of the moon. They why of the sky and the commotion of the ocean”. From Cambridge, where he lived, he also influenced many other folksingers, including Joan Baez, the daughter of an MIT physicist.

bats

There's a profile of Paul and Patricia Churchland, husband and wife philosophers, in this week's New Yorker. They are interested in neuroscience and questions about mind/body dualities. At one point, Thomas Nagel's essay "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" is described. Nagel asks the reader to try to imagine what it is like to be a bat.

"Insofar as I can imagine this (which is not very far)," he wrote, "it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat." The purpose of this exercise, Nagel explained, was to demonstrate that, however impossible it might be for humans to imagine, it was very likely that there was something it was like to be a bat, and that thing, that set of facts-the bat's intimate experience, its point of view, its consciousness-could not be translated into the sort of objective language that another creature could understand...But if the bat's consciousciousness-the what-it-is-like-to-be-a-bat-is not graspable by human concepts, while the bat's physical makeup is, then it is very difficult to imagine how humans could come to understand the relationship between them.

The impossiblity of imaging the interior life of a bat, while at the same time being able to understand the biology of the bat is used as an argument for a special status for consciousness, and against the ability of neuroscience to completely understand it. For some, this is an argument for a fundamental mind/brain duality. The Churchlands strenously disagree, and I'm inclined to second them. The fact that we can't fully imagine what it's like to be a bat is not that informative. If we weren't faced with the fact of bats themselves would we be able to imagine them?

[Looks like there's no online version of the New Yorker article. Sorry.]

Ice Hymenoxys

Here's another winter picture. From digging, by way of apartmenttherapy, one of my (many) frivolous indulgences.

Snow

I wish it would snow. Snow is one of the consolations of living away from California, but this year the weather keeps teasing me. I know that in other places they are drowning it it, but I've missed what little we've had. Here's a picture from last year.

Strawberry eyes and carrot nose - it's a little exhibit of how our economy has changed from the days of Frosty, when snowmen had to make do with coal and buttons.

Giant Squid

Inspired by one of Errol Morris’s First Person segments, I went looking for information on Giant Squid and stumbled upon this trove of images that are in the public domain. They are not organized well, but some are quite interesting. Here is another:

A very special day

Most of the time work at the hospital comes closest to Scrubs. Occasionally, like last night, it is similar to an episode of ER. (Apparently the combination of Monday and cold weather makes many teenagers want to drink draino.)

Today was straight out of an ABC after school special. Or maybe one of those movies they show on Lifetime or Oxygen.