Thats how the conversation with my parents started out a few nights ago, as I declared my final college choice and ‘career path’ to them, and yes it was medicine and yep so far it is to become a surgeon (69.8424% sure), which does take, I’m estimating a little over 10 years. I remember when I was around 7 or 8 year old I always told everyone I would be a doctor similar to what I see a lot of little kids doing right now, and like most parents mine would always agree with my statement. Well things began to change, around the age of 12 I met my cousin, a computer fanatic. He did everything from program to hack and soon enough he became a kind of role model to me. And since the day I met him to now I have expanded my knowledge in design, coding, and IT in general. From designing whole stationary systems for companies to coding simple scripts it all became part of my life, but what most people didn’t know was my inside fascination for a career in medicine. The fact that I can help people, change lives, and at the same time have an intense, exciting job always intrigued me.  Also another part little issue I have is that I always want to learn more about every field I can.  Personally I think (no offense to any computer science majors) that programming, SEO, business management, design, etc etc can be self taught to a certain extent, much like my cousin did, and careers in medicine I believe can certainly NOT be self taught.

Anyway getting a bit off topic.  The conversation with my parents a few nights ago was much different from many others we have had in the forgotten past.  This time they wanted to make sure I was ready for the long hours, and years it would take to accomplish my goal.  Another issue was how it would be financed, for which I have my own plans.  This summer I plan to shadow a few surgeons and find out how their lifestyle is like.

Ah this was a pretty random post, but yea, just wanted to say I’ve finalized Medicine as my career

Snow in March!?? Whats happening, global warming or climate changes or is it that theory from 10 years ago.. El Nino? Okay, so for some people this may not be the most amazing phenomenon but the region of the of the country I currently reside in has not seen snow for years and to see it in March is simply amazing. I remember back around Christmas time how news reporters were constantly blabbing on about a white Christmas which never happened, and then the 15 minutes of snow that hit about two months ago wasn’t much either but last night was good enough to keep my content. About 2:45 on Friday, as I stood outside school talking to a few friends, hail began to fail. Around 8 hours later snow began to fall. The first thing I did was grab a camera, call a few friends, and run outside. We sat around outside a while and then drove around the city…yea I know its a bit ‘lame’ but it was exciting! After about a hour or two I returned home with a snowball..hit my dad on the stomach with it, and must say had a pretty content day.

And oh yea, I never thought that ever individual flake of snow was actually shaped like a nice star snowflake. The above is a picture of my jacket..not so great but you can see the little star shaped snow.

Unedited. Unrevised writing.

Hmm.. I know the above sounds weird and probably makes no sense at all but their is great signficance behind it, and I just had to let out a flow of thought onto the blog.

I’m still sane.

Recently a team led by MIT Professor Robert Langer and Jeff Karp, created an adhesive tape that could become an important tool for surgeons in the near future.  The tape could serve as a replacement for staples or sutures in surgical processes as it is both biodegradable and can stick in wet environments without to much trouble.  Problems previous tapes had involved their ability to to expand and contract with the muscles or organs they were applied or their inability to stick in wet environments.  Another important aspect of this tape is that it does not produce dangerous toxins as it slowly dissolves while the wound or incisions heal.  The tape could be used to patch holes, or even wrap around intestines in gastric bypass procedures.

Now where do the geckos come in? Well the tape uses Gecko skin to…JK. Actually the team followed the princile behind those of the Gecko’s paws. The surface of the tape has microscale bumps that give the tape a few advantages, and over this is a layer of glue that allows it to stick in wet environments. The product has been tried on pig intestines and proved to work very efficiently. This product could be a great tool in the future for surgeons as it will allow them to insert this tape on small incisions where suture could be extremely difficult.

Even with our last minute efforts all the projects placed.  Medical technology won first, while the other two hit 3rd place, allowing me to go to state competitions for all three.

Here are the medical technology boards I threw together, most likely I am going to redesign and redo the entire project for state competitions.

January and the new year started off pretty exciting, but the quickly came to an end. Around January 2nd I remember one of my close friends telling me how doctors suspected his mother may have cancer, and reports would come in two days. Well it turned out she didn’t have cancer and we are all thankful for that. A day or two after that my uncle passed away in New York after being in a coma for almost 10 years. His condition had been critical for the past 2-3 days and we received no notifications of this from the hospital’s staff. My father flew out to NYC the next morning and I don’t remember much from those days.

After that the two C’s began to dominate once more - College & Calculus. I sat online most of my nights filling out as many college scholarships as I could, the biggest reason being that one of my college choices was one of the most expensive colleges in the area. I’ve been accepted to one of the colleges of my choice and currently awaiting acceptance from another Honors College. excitement

Alright so all in all those are some of the biggest reason’s I haven’t had time for the blog lately, but once again I’ve got another boost of energy to keep it going. It should pick up more as I begin shadowing a few local surgeons and enter college which is only months away!

And just want to thank anyone who reads my blog, as you guys are much of my reason to keep going.

Sometimes there is not much to say and feelings can’t be described in a million words. About 45 seconds in photoshop and three images cropped together is the best way I can explain those feelings right now.

- I hope everyone has a Merry Christmas.

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Dear Editor—

I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, “If you see it in The Sun, it’s so.” Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?

Virginia O’Hanlon

Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except [what] they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours, man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The external light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies. You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if you did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived could tear apart. Only faith, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives and lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay 10 times 10,000 years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.
-Francis P. Church

It connects the masses, it connects individuals who would never get to meet or even know of the others existence. A pharmacist in the States can read about the miseries and joys of a Junior Doctor in the United Kingdom. An artist can portray his life in words to us, and an everyday user can just rant on about his or her problems knowing that out of the billion people surfing the web atleast someone has read and sympathized with him. Some use blogs as an online journal, others use them as a source to output useful information, either way once the blog is online with articles ready to go it is part of “The Blog World”, an intricate online network of users and communities that go beyond just a website. It is like a Yahoo! chatroom only with a slower pacer, and instead of just chatting to the other users you know of a part of there everyday life. A part that even those who have physically know this person may not know of. When I first began to blog, around two months ago, it seemed like a pretty simple little idea to me and pretty pointless. Open a site and rant on and on about your everyday life that no one is going to read about unless you just found the cure for cancer, however, it is much more then that. A few weeks after blogging I noticed how well many bloggers knew each other. They could relate with each other on many issues and it was a virtual community. In most instances there was no online portal or forums connecting one blogger to another and unlike a website these bloggers did not compete with one another. I noticed that they would constantly link and refer to other blog throughout their posts. “The Blog World” is a online virtual world of everday people — doctors, soldiers, artists, designers, walmart clerks, and who knows whom else. Medilogy is just another new citizen of this large and complex world and I hope it can become a larger and more well-known part of “The Blog World”

And as a new blogger I must say it is pretty addicting. I don’t know if anyone even reads my posts and I’m certainly not getting any kind of capital from it, however, for some reason I still come to my blog everyday to see if there is a new comment or to think of new articles to post, and I don’t think anyone but another blogger knows of this feeling.

The youngest mother, how old could you expect her to be? Ten, Eleven, or Twelve? Those were the ages that first came across my head as I began to read about five-year-old Lina Medina, who gave birth to a 6 lb child at the Andean village of Ticrapo in 1939. It was a very phenomenal case and the likelihood of it was so rare that many individuals still believe it is not true. Most girls began to develop around the age of 12 when they hit puberty, however, doctors found that Medina had a regular cycle of periods since the age of 3. According to her doctor, Escomel, she had a hormonal disorder of the pituitary gland that became the cause for this early development. Around the age of 4 1/2 Medina’s mother began to believe she had some type of tumor in her stomach and after taking her to a local doctor was it found that the girl was pregnant. Much speculation has been made that the father of the child was Lina’s father. He was put in jail for a short period of time but later released because of a lack of evidence. After giving birth to Gerard (name of Medina’s doctor), Medina’s psychological behavior remained the same. She would prefer playing with dolls rather then her own child. Also her son Gerard believed his mother was just his sibling but around the age of 10 found out the truth as local boys teased him about it.  Both grew up to have healthy lives and Lina married at the age of 33 and had a second child.

The full article on this issue can be found here.

Whether the ACT scores come out good or bad, one thing is for certain and that is the fact that I feel much more relieved. It was becoming a huge weight on my back and now its over with. With 1 more week left until midterm exams and Christmas break I feel life is getting better, and of course I should start getting time to finish up a few actual med-related articles I have sitting in my draft for the past few weeks.

P.S - Just in case your reading this ‘J’ I hope my guessing skills come out as good as yours…yea he did end up making a 29 out of 36 on the most hated science section of the ACT by reading half the question and taking a ‘educated’ guess.

Well on the brighter side my first college application went through and they accepted me with a scholarship beyond my expectations, keeping in mind it is a private college and one of the most expensive colleges in the area. My final shot at bringing a higher ACT score is also going to take place this Saturday where I am hoping to take the score to a 33 out of 36. Let’s see how it goes, also thanks everyone who has commented on the blog and for the emails.

P.S - It took me queite some time to describe the last few days, after a little help with Dictionary.com stodgy seemed to be the best match.

Stodgy - heavy, dull, or uninteresting; tediously commonplace; boring; of a thick, semisolid consistency; heavy

Update: Been around a hour since I made this post, and I’m starting to feel today has been a productive day, after the past few weeks of ‘hardship’.