Narcissistic Praise Junkie and Thrash Your Wedding Dress

I stumbled on a few interesting articles on the net.

Wired.com has an article on how the US Navy Recruitment who did a study on the milineal generation likens them to 'Alien life forces' who are 'Narcissistic Praise Junkies' who expect to be praised just for showing up at work. Apparently recent childhood is defined by ego stroking and the reports goes so far to call them the coddled generation. Maybe it's just a generation gap thing because I suspect every generation before them thinks the current generation have it easy. Maybe they are having it easier in some ways but I suspect other things like competition at school and work may also have gotten tougher. Check out the article below if you like.

http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/09/omg-navy-calls-.html

Thrash the dress. Saw this in the local paper today. Have you heard of this before? Apparently it's the 'unconventional' way of ending your wedding day or getting extra mileage out of your already so expensive wedding dress. Do a google on it and you'll see what I mean. I think the only people to benefit from this are the wedding photographer. Imagine this, we have this standard package that cost 1000 euros. Then if you want a album it cost 1800 euros. Then there's probably the option of adding thrash the dress, so it's probably 500 euros more. From the general response on the net, not everybody thinks it's cool. The girlfriend doesn't think it's cool. I don't think it's cool. But then I can be quite a sentimental person. I feel the dress is an integral part of a wedding ceremony, and having something physical to connect you to the event is something nice. Each to its own I guess but the pictures from it do look pretty good.

http://trashthedress.wordpress.com/

Good night.

Paediatric Rotation

Emergency Medicine is one of the fields that exposes you to patients at the extremes of the age spectrum and at everything in between. So a rotation in Paediatric Medicine in somewhat essential and it's something I need to do next. Funny thing is when the nursing staff asked me what I was going to do for the next 6 months and I told them I was trying to get a paediatric rotation, they all gave me this funny look. Granted, I did say kids are nothing more than expensive hobbies and generally find them irrelevant unless they can be taught to do tricks, it does not mean I cannot function well as a paediatric doctor. Take for example, if you brought me your expensive car, your precious little hobby, and asked me to look after it as a favour, I would. Not only will I treat it right, I'll also make sure it gets a nice shine on it every sunday morning. So if you brought your little bundle of joy to be seen by me, I will without a doubt, treat it like your little bundle of joy and send it home beaming!

Why am I not a natural with kids? I suspect a few things along my medical career has bruised me irrepairably. Rewind the clock back seven years and you'll find me in Katete, Zambia as a medical student running the Paediatric Malaria ward. I am proud to say I didn't lose a single sprog in the 6 weeks I was there. However, one thing that puzzled me was everytime I approached a baby in the ward, they'd start crying before I even touched them. One day, I enquired why that way the case, the mother answered and the male nurse dutifully translated that it was because I was ugly. That can't be good for anyones self esteem.

Granted, I don't look anything like Zambians. Put a Malaysians smack in the middle of Zambia they all start calling you Japanese because you have this thick trendy glasses and a goatee. Hang on, did she think Japanese people were ugly?! So it's not me really!

Anyways, I've mellowed down over the years and have learnt to deal with kids a lot better. I got a Basset Hound called Odie a few months back and I've learnt a lot from him. Oh wait, I can hear Odie barking. That means he's hungry and it's time to feed him! See, I might be on my way to be the best Paediatric SHO this side of town yet!

Odie the Basset Hound

I've been messing with Odie for the last few days. When we got Odie, we were hoping for a placid little dog that doesn't require too much physical activity. I am not sure where I stumbled on the information that the Basset Hound would make the ideal low activity animal and I'm sure I got my info wrong. Well, this fella can play all day, and play he will until he drops from exhaustion. Not quite the lazy and placid animal we were hoping for. But nevertheless, we've come to love him and we find ourselves suckered by his irrestible cuteness. I've been attempting to teach him tricks and he loves tricks. I think dogs love tricks in general as it's a form of play for them.

If you like, you can check out the vid below to see Odie play fetch.

Odie

Meet Odie. 7 month old Basset Hound. Young energetic and very affectionate. Not very bright and somewhat willful.

Imaginary treatment helps chronic back pain

Who hasn't hurt their back at some stage in their life ? Patients with chronic back pain present to the Emergency Department all the time. Personally, I don't find chronic back pain cases to be enjoyable cases. Especially when half the time, it's not possible to provide complete if not near satisfactory treatment for the condition. You see, traditional guidelines don't work half the time . The policy of the hospital I work in dictates that we do not keep patients in overnight for chronic back pains merely for pain relief. Reason being that there is already a shortage of acute beds and clogging up the system with patients with chronic back pains is probably not judicious use of what is already a very limited and finite resource. So often enough, you try and give what little relief you can by loading the patients up with as much pain killers and muscle relaxants as possible, let them settle for a couple of hours and do your best to get them home afterwards. Often enough you are made to feel like the villian as orthopaedics surgeons won't touch them with a barge pole either.

Ir's not that I am not symphathetic. I've hurt my back more than once. The funny thing is , it doesn't take much to injure it. The first time I did it, I was bending over to pick up my trousers in the changing room. Then snap, this crazy blinding pain just shot through my back and I was crippled with pain, unable to move. I couldn't do anything except lie there awkwardly against a chair, trousers at my ankles. It wasn't a pretty sight.

I stumbled on this interesting article in Wired today. Apparently fake acupunture and 'real' acupunture both work better than the conventional treatment of back pain, which is oral painkillers and physiotherapy. Both type of acupuntures provide pain relief for 6 months after treatment.

It certainly raises a few questions like:

1. Is so called traditional acupuncture a complete sham after all?


2. Maybe acupuncture works just by simply sticking any number of needles in your back. No special points required


3. Does acupunture work through the placebo effect?


4. Then perhaps people with chronic back pains are simply a little looney (myself included)


5. Will I be allowed to prescribe placebo at any stage if it does no harm ? "Here's a new special tablet. You'll be back doing all the positions of the karma sutra in no time! Err, no, it's not a polo mint, really!"

If you want to check out the article for yourself, follow the link below.
For back pain, even fake acupunture works.

The excerpt from the original research article is found here :
German Acupuncture Trials (GERAC) for Chronic Low Back Pain

So no magic bullet for chronic back pains just yet. Don't fret, have a polo mint on me instead. It works just as well!

It's broken and I'm not sorry

Lately, (for the last 7 years actually!) I've been considering a career change. Everytime I tell myself I should just quit medicine and do something else, I've always found a reason to stick with it and I just can't make up my mind on the whole issue. Hence I've been at it for 7 years. Half dreading going to work everyday and then coming home buzzing from the things I've done at work! Besides, the band I'm managing hasn't made it big yet! So I can keep on dreaming!

One thing I do enjoy about medicine is diagnosing bone fractures and telling the patients about it! The doctor's done good ya!? The dramatic ones love it and get a kick out of it. In fact, in some cases those patients are almost disappointed if they didn't have a broken bone! You almost have to remind them, "Hey stupid, no fracture, that's a good thing, okaaaaaay?!"

As an Emergency Physician, I get my kicks from positive signs, especially the rare and cool ones! Like my first rectal foreign body case! I've been in A&E for 3 years before I got my first one and they don't come too regularly in this part of town. It was a definite milestone. It was the x-ray of the day and it reminded people who saw it what not to do with a can of foot spray.

My girlfriend thinks I like it for the glory! Well, some days yes! and that's really just amongst the medical staff! Someday there's no glory, just lots of shit raining down on you. Those kind of days really make you wonder why you're still waddling in the poo, when it's just the same shit, different day.

I can drone on about the negatives like the work hours, the stress, some of the crazy/lazy/waste of space consultants you have to work for, the crappy basic salary, the days when you just feel it's like the most thankless job ever but you have to tune in to"Physician's Lamentations" next week for that. j/k Anyways, all the negatives have so far failed to help me make up my mind. It's probably because I still enjoy what I do and because I'm pretty good at it too! My girlfriend thinks I should give it 10 more years. I've already done 6 years of medical school and 5 years of work, so what's another 10?

Teaching the girl to game

I think every geek out there secretly wants a girlfriend who plays computer games and understands his obsession with games! Blessed is he who has a women that thumbs and clicks! Of course this could all backfire if the girlfriend becomes addicted to gaming and doesn't shower for days. As a result your only hope for fresh air is when she leaves the room.

My girlfriend has little or no interest in computer games at all. It didn't stop me from attempting to introduce her to Neverwinter Nights a few years ago, thinking the social aspect of it, i.e chatting with fellow gamers etc would get her interested. My ulterior motive then was to get her participating with what was already my major addiction then. Well, she didn't like it and I was left contemplating the errors of my ways.

So then last month, I got this sudden craving for a game console. I felt the time was right to buy one and I wanted one in my life and there was just no stopping me. But I didn't know which one to buy. Eventually I settled for a Wii and the reason for choosing that was because I thought it was something the girlfriend could get into! Hang on, you say, there's a recurring pattern here and yes you're right! Strangely enough! She liked it but lost interest after I beat her too many times at wii tennis. She's such a sore loser!

But she's not all bad though. Sensing that my gaming cravings were not quite satisfied (since wii games were mostly pussy games and I need something a little hardcore), she bought me an xbox 360 for my birthday. Bless her soul, I was flabbergasted. It was something I totally didn't need but simply just wanted! A man can't have too many gaming consoles!

So with the new xbox plugged in, I tried to get her to play some co-op game, that's only because she was hogging Call of Duty 3. I wouldn't have mind but she hadn't quite mastered the controllers. Spending time looking at the floor and sky and not being able to navigate through an open door may seem funny at first but it gets really tiring after 40 minutes of the same thing. The only co-op game I had then was Gear of Wars. 10 minutes into the game, she thought it was boring and decided she would watch tv instead.

I'm back at square one again.

Holiday plans sorted

So finally booked a holiday. Myself and the girlfriend are heading off to Cape Town in November for our yearly break. She's getting it as a birthday present so she's pretty ok with it. Though our initial destination was Morrocco, I found out as a Malaysian citizen, I needed a visa for Morrocco. Where as the girlfriend doesn't need it as she's Irish. The irony is I know more Irish folks working abroad illegally than I do Malaysians. Anyways, it takes at least 4 weeks to get the visa approved. As there's no gurantee that I will get the visa and it would be too late to book another holiday if the visa wasn't approved, I decided to go for the safer option. While the both of us have been to South Africa, although not together, I'd say it'd be a nice experience to go back again. I remember how cheap and good the food was over there. I had some good and lots of crazy experience when I was there 7 years ago. I suspect the trip this time round will be more sedated and I suspect age will have a lot to do with it.

Now for something less cheerful. Only recently, one of the nursing staff in the Emergency Department I worked with found out that she had breast cancer and that it has spread to her lower spine. While we are used to seeing patients coming in with first time diagnoses of cancer, it is always shocking when it happens to be one of your own. She only found out about it when she started getting back pains. So she had missed it in her breast as the primary and she only had a mammogram the year before! There's no cure and she's got at most, a couple of years to live and her children are only very young! So girlies, and this statement is not made lightly, fondle your breasts regularly. If you can't be arsed to do that, I am sure your partner would appreciate the oppurtunity to assist you. It could really be a difference between life and death.
Good night!

Corn Beef

I had corn beef for dinner tonight. First time in 4 years. Eating corn beef reminds me of my child hood. It was one of the few canned meat that I actually enjoyed, along with luncheon meat or spam as they call it here. Classy!

I suddenly realise I had no idea what corn beef was actually made of, bar the beef of course. I never bothered to find out, till today!

Corn beef as we know it today owes its origin to the Irish who began salting beef and pork in the middle ages. Basically, the Irish started debonning pieces of beef and soaking them in brine ( a process called curing). The name corned beef came about in the 1600s. "Corn" comes from the Anglo-Saxon word for granule or pellet, referring to the grains of salt used to make the brine in which the beef soaked.

Well, who would have thunk. The corn beef I ate when I was a kid was brung from China!

So how much salt is in the typical can of corn beef? According to saltmatters.org, the typical sodium content of corned beef is 1200 mg/100g or more. The human bodies requires about 5 gram of salt per day. That's a lot of salt man! The funny thing is that there used to be a lot more salt in the old days. The stuff they used to feed the sailors back then had so much salt in it they call it 'salt junk'. At least the current corn beef today doesn't taste half bad.

To sum up, tonight's cheap and tasty corn beef meal consisted of
1. Stir fried corn beef and lightly cooked chopped up peppers ( 1.20 euro for beef and 2 euro for peppers )
2. Peas (1 euro)
3. Rice (1 euro approx )
total cost of meal for two, 5.20 euro.

My next plan is to make my own corn beef. I'll let you know when it happens.

My wedding plans

I am too complicated for my own good. Actually, it's probably more like I make my own life too complicated for my own good.

When it comes to weddings, well my wedding, it's no different.

I proposed to my fiance two Christmas' ago, as you guessed, on Christmas day. Proposing on a date like that is very practical as it makes the date easy to remember. As you can guess, I'm not a big romantic. So when I asked my girl friend to marry me, it's also for a practical reason, that is, to assure her that I want to spend the rest of my life with her. On top of that, I quite fancy her on most days and we are arguably in love. So I thought, it was not a bad deal at all.

So I decided to buy this ring in Malaysia. Well, I sort of knew what she wanted as she had hinted strongly at a princess cut diamond ring just prior to me leaving for Malaysia. She knew I was going to buy 'the ring' when she discovered one of her rings was missing (I had to borrow it to figure out her ring size lah). She then proceeded to quiz me and one of the things I'm not is a good liar. Even as I stood there denying profusely that I had taken her ring, I knew she had guessed when this massive grin spread across her face and it's as though her face had lit up like the full moon. I thought I saw fireworks exploding over her head too!

Well, I stuck with my plan to buy her a ring without her around to choose it. I was informed later on by my mates that it was very brave of me to do so. Anyways, I stopped by in KL on my way to Kuching. In between buying a DSLR, a new stereo, a new laptop, a new projector and some new clothes, I managed to find just enough time to buy her a ring. All this in 5 hours of stop over time. I was quite proud of my achievement as I had never shopped so hard before. I always knew I had it in me!

Anyways, to cut the story short, the ring came home to Ireland with me. Stayed hidden for 3 months. Which is quite an accomplishment in itself as the girlfriend has a habit of finding things that are usually meant to be hidden. I proposed, she accepted amidst my stuttering of words while I had forgotten my previously well composed lines due to unforseen nervousness. I had even forgotten to get down on one knee as planned. Disaster!

From there on, we lived happily ever after.

Wrong!

You have to plan your wedding ceremony first! The point is, I had planned for the happily ever after bit but I totally forgot about the getting married part. If there ever was a an industry designed to blatantly rip you off, this would be it! Getting married is stressful!

Here's a few things I dislike about weddings
1. It's not really your wedding . It's everyone else's wedding. Those of you who come from Asian families know it's about keeping your mum and dad happy. Your friends and work colleagues happy. You try not to offend anyone. The 'wedding politics' is enough to make you think twice about getting married.

2. It's so damn expensive! We've set our budget at 20k euro. From an Irish wedding perspective, that's actually a pretty low amount. I keep hearing people say, you only get married once. You may as well do it right. But hey buddy, the wedding is just the first day of the rest of your marriage, do you really want to start it by being in debt ? I know plenty of people who have to take out a loan to get married. But we're saving for ours and we can't afford more than 20k. That's a deposit on a house!

3. It takes too much organizing. Why can't I have a wedding perfectly tailored for me without me having to cut corner and stick to the budget? Why can't all the people I don't necessary want at the wedding but I have to invite anyway for my parents' sake simply declare themselves unavailable for the wedding so I don't have to sort out my wedding invite list like it was some kind of military strategic planning?

4. The evil florist. It appears weddings are synonymous with flowers. So you can't have weddings without flowers but bloody hell, flowers aren't cheap. The florist know they've got the market cornered on that one and aren't shy about charging you an arm and a leg for a little carnation for your button hole. Well Mr/Ms Florist, No! I don't want to pay you 50 euros for some kind of consultation fee just because you call yourself a 'designer' florist!

5. Wedding photographers. These guys really really rip you off! I'm rather disgusted with this lot. I work as a doctor. Even I don't get paid as much as this guys for the kind of hours they put in. Enough said.

6. My wedding car isn't a spaceship. I don't want a horse drawn carriage or some vintage car. I want to beam into church please!

Ok, maybe I might have it tough! But I've been assured by my female friends that the brides have more to worry about. Well guess what, better them than me.

So that's that! Next time I'll try and post some tips about saving money for your wedding but don't hold your breath! I haven't got any yet.