Worst Fears Monday, Nov 9 2009

My worst fear is that I will go blind.

I do not even believe this is the worst bodily harm that could befall me, suddenly losing my hearing would be much more isolating. But I don’t fear losing my hearing the way I fear losing my sight. It is a fear that I’ve lived with all my adult life.

Everything I do is visual. My profession involves working with my hands at a lab bench, or looking into microscopes, or editing scientific illustrations for publication. My spare time is filled with embroidery, art projects, video games, board games, sewing, reading, writing. My vacations are travel, to see the world. Everything I do is visual. Losing my sight would demolish almost every single thing in my life.

I am myopic, so myopic that laser surgery could at best restore 2/3 of my vision. I have high astigmatism. I have thin retinas and every year at my opthamologist appointment I am lectured on the symptoms of retinal detachments and tears. I have a small cataract in one eye.

I’m twenty nine.

Really, my age is what makes it so horrifying for me. All these problems with my eyes and I’m not thirty.

I haven’t been unaware. I’ve taken good care of my sight. I’ve seen a proper opthamologist every year since I graduated with my bachelors degree. I hate people fiddling with my eyes, I can’t wear contacts because I can’t stand to havae them fitted, but I go to the doctor every year like clockwork. I struggled with light sensitivity and glare until after years of searching I finally found the perfect pair of sunglasses. I get new lenses every two years like clockwork, and wear each pair of frames for 4-5 years just to help bear the cost. Even with special vision insurance, a new pair of lenses costs over $400.

Last week I noticed a persistent bright spot in my vision, right at the focal point of my left eye. I was as though I looked at a bright light, then looked away. I wasn’t sure what to do about it, it took me several days to notice that it was persistent. Then I realized that if I closed my right eye, it was a blind spot. So I went to the doctor. There were tests.

I have a small hemorrhage beneath the macula of my left eye, from abnormal blood vessel growth, that is pushing the macula up. I have macular degeneration in my left eye and I’m not thirty.

Well, they can treat it. The current hot treatment is to inject an anti-angiogenic drug into the vitreous humor of the eye. So not only do I have the eye problems of someone twice my age, the best current solution is to let someone stick a needle into my eye.

I’m torn between a House-esque fascination with the rare and/or interesting and an increasing sensation of feeling sick to my stomach.

My fascination is, at least, authentic. It’s not bravado. I am interested in the treatment, and the theory behind it. And I can hold out hope for future research and improvement in treatment.

Then the health care reform bill passed the House, and I’ve been feeling sick ever since.

I’m not yet thirty. I’m afflicted with a disorder normally belonging to people twice my age. I can only, rationally, expect that the health of my eyes will not improve as I age. If I am lucky, it will stay the same for years before degenerating further. If I am unlucky, I will lose my vision.

And now, with the abomination of socialized care before me, what do I have to look forward to? Only to be left to go blind when I am no longer of any use to society. If there are new treatments, would I be permitted to benefit from them? As it stands right now, with relatively excellent health insurance and with separate vision insurance, I don’t know if my treatment will be covered. I would far rather pay for my treatment and take what comes, as I am faced with doing now! I have always stood or stumbled on my own feet, but I have never felt so powerless about my future as I do today.

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Stuck Saturday, Nov 7 2009

Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. … The general fact is simple. Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion, like the physical exhaustion of Mr. Holbein. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.

-G.K.Chesterton, Orthodoxy

I actually have things to write, many of them, some of an urgent and distressing nature. But I can’t at the moment, as my head is busy splitting.

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Silly Excuses Monday, Oct 19 2009

A while ago, on an old college friend’s blog, I stumbled across a comment that mentioned she didn’t want a second child, and “what would that say to our first child? That she isn’t good enough?”

I call bull.

One could equally argue that if you don’t have more than one child, it tells your child that he was too difficult and naughty for you to ever consider giving him siblings.

If you don’t want another child, that’s fine. Sorrowful, in my opinion, but fine. But don’t try to cast it up as a high and noble consideration for your child’s feelings, because kids just don’t think like that. Either argument is a modern ideology, not born out from experience.

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iTunes Genius Fail Sunday, Oct 18 2009

Would you like to know what the iTunes Genius is offering me while I’m listening to The Planets, by Gustav Holst?

Songs by Queen, Alice Cooper, Madonna, Black Sabbath, Rush, Billy Idol, Nirvana…

This is not music that “goes together”. It’s not the same genre. It’s not even from the same galaxy of genres. It’s incomprehensible. Ridiculous.

It’s stupid, that’s what it is.

Basically, iTunes wouldn’t know classical music if classical music shot a cannon at it. And you’d better watch it, iTunes. Classical music likes to use cannons.

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Incomprehensible Saturday, Oct 17 2009

Thursday was a bewilderingly annoying day at work, courtesy of our MD/PhD student and our 4th year medical student on rotation.

Between the two of them, between their two undergraduate degrees and 7 cumulative years of medical school, they could not make and pH a buffer with instructions, in under 3 attempts.

First they came and asked me where the 1M TrisHCl was, I check for them and told them they needed to make more.
Then they needed instructions to make more, which I provided. Making a 1M solution should be trivial, but not everyone paid attention in Chem 101, so hey. You weight out the necessary salt, dissolve it in less than your total volume, pH the solution, then bring it up to the total volume.
Then they needed help working the pH meter – fair enough, our pH meter is pretty obnoxious. I go and show them exactly how to calibrate it and then we try to pH the buffer they made.

• Problem 1 – They only made 10 mL of buffer. Seriously, why wouldn’t you just make 100 or 200 mL of buffer? It won’t go to waste. This is more a peeve against selfish laziness.
• Problem 2 – They didn’t dissolve the salt. I kid you not, they handed me a 15mL conical tube with a lump of undissolved salt in the bottom.
• Problem 3 – Prior to pHing, the buffer was already over the maximum volume. They had 11 mL of buffer, it looks like they put 10 mL of water in the tube and added the salt to that. This makes the solution 0.91M instead of the 1M they needed. I specifically told them how to avoid this when I gave them instructions, and they ignored me.

At this point, I step in, weigh the necessary salt for 100 mL of buffer, put it in a bottle with about 75 mL of water and a stir bar and tell them to pH it with this 1M sodium hydroxide [at this point I displayed the bottle] when the salt is dissolved, then don’t do anything else until I get back, because I have a delivery to pick up at the loading dock.

When I get back, they’re running water into the bottle… It turns out they tried to pH their buffer with the calibration buffers for the pH meter.

The pH calibration buffers are brightly colored.

I presume they got it right the third time around, but I had an experiment to start, so I don’t actually know they did it right. I do know that I will not use any of that buffer, I will make my own.

I’m not annoyed that I had to tell them how to make the buffer. I’m annoyed that I gave them step by step instructions and they still couldn’t do it right. And it isn’t an isolated incident. We go through the same thing with how to do Western blots, extract protein from tissue, and on and on and on, over and over again.
If you cannot handle some of the most basic laboratory techniques after two summer rotations in our lab, followed by being shown by the senior PhD student and the postdoc, not to mention myself, what are you doing getting a PhD?
The 4th year medical student I can at least understand, a month long rotation doing basic science research is a cake walk compared to clinical rotations, it’s almost a vacation. You can’t get anything done in a month, so there are no expectations. It’s just C.V. padding.
But if you can’t do the benchwork, even with multiple explanations of how the technique works and what to do, why are you torturing yourself?
Better question, why are you torturing the rest of us?

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