infected...

I think I'll try to title my listings after bad religion songs for a while.

So I took the afternoon off after I kept fazing out in the morning. I'm down with the flu...standard issue stuff. Headaches, sore muscles, dizziness, fever, no cough, sore throat and all that good stuff.

I'm a little tired of medicine in general. I think it's mostly because of the people that I've been working with. I was in the geriatric clinic yesterday and the lady just kept bashing primary care. In the beginning it was fun because we're both perves and we were laughing at the abbreviated list titles like the cum list (cumulative list). In addition, I got to meet really cool patients like a 85 y/o guy who broke his shoulder and ribs when he fell off his horse last week. Then he broke his hip while wrestling with a bull. Pretty badass. Anyhow, about my preceptor. She was faculty at UCLA, but couldn't compete in the LA area because of oversaturation and all the FP docs willing to work for peanuts. She literally spent 30 minutes telling me I was a nice guy and should do something else. That I would become tired later down the line once I had kids and all that good stuff. Then she literally took me by the hand and walked me down the hall to urology to talk to them...so much for learning primary care. I've gotta say, the urology guy was really nice. Training is only 6 years and he loves his job. He gets to work in the primary care clinic taking care of urinary problems. Rabbit, you'd like him. His motto is "all dick, all the time." Anyhow, he also gets fun time in the OR doing complicated kidney surgeries and stuff like that. Every week he gets job offers for obscene amounts of money and he work 4 days a week. The best part is, his job evolves with him as he ages. In the beginning, he did hardcore kidney cancer surgeries and cancer gene research. Now he likes to work mostly in the clinic. If he wants, he can always change his focus. It's not like primary care where we're drowning in paperwork all the time. Every once in a while, I meet patients who really make my day and I want to do right by them. However, when I'm being honest with myself I know that in general, I don't think people are that great. My car go egged to shit yesterday and I find that most of the people I meet in this world are assholes, ignorant, whatever. It's draining to work with them, trying to make their lives better when all they wanna do is screw themselves over some more, or try to screw me over. I'm still altruistic and full of romantic notions of medicine, but seriously, it's hard to keep a good perspective. I came into this profession cuz I wanna be out there keeping people doing what they wanna do. I wish all the docs out there would do me a favor and stop calling people gomers, or whatever the hell they call them. damn...I'm strung out on cold meds.

On a sidenote, I don't know how I feel about perks anymore. I was supposed to go have dinner at Ruth's Chris. It was a talk pushing a new tetracycline class antibiotic are abdominal complications post surgery. I really wanted my free steak. The company is Wyeth. Seriously, it's not like we're not gonna be pushing their drugs. They make Robitussin, Advil, premarin. It's stuff that I'd prescribe anyway. Either way, my pharm friend called me to say that they ran out of room because the restaurant overbooked. A small part of me was relieved, but I'm not completely sure why. It is a very gray line and slippery slope from free bagels for breakfast, to steak dinners at ruth's chris.

Anyway, so I'm sitting at home, medicated out of my mind trying to figure out my absentee ballot. I don't know how they expect regular people to fill this out. The only thing I really care about is prop 85, cuz we need to protect dem teenage girls. The rest seems like a mess. For starters, I don't know who the candidates are and what their platforms are. I don't want to vote by party lines, although I am technically independent. I just don't wanna put some weakass candidates in office who are gonna mess up and end up hurting people, our children, schools, etc. I don't know who to vote for and I don't want to mess anything up. Judicial candidates: I am tempted to just look up who appointed them and what their key cases were. It's hard for me to support anyone appointed by pete wilson, no matter how great they are. eh. The propositions are all confusing too. Of course they're written in a nice way, but there are layers and layers of crap embedded in those propositions. I have no way to know who to believe. I guess I'll just vote for the basic things...fix the levees so we don't become like Louisiana during flood season, shelter the poor battered women. I'm rambling, but some of this other stuff is ridiculous. Put GPS on sexual predators? Seriously? If these people are still a threat, why are we putting them back on the street? How has their sentence done any good to us or them if they're just the same old sick farts? I'm not saying we should castrate the fuckers, but so what if they don't live 2 blocks from a park? They can drive there. Our system is so ridiculous and wasteful. We throw technology at everything, even in medicine. Damn...I'm rambling, but I don't care. I'm so frustrated and disappointed with the world we live in.

I'm just riled up because I just always thought that I could make a difference. I thought people gave a shit about stuff and weren't complete selfish tools. I believed that people got married because of love and that parent-child love is unconditional. I think I'll get a nice dinner and drink my sorrows away...

-bender