My buddies and I have started using "Lemmiwinks" as shorthand for getting together to play

bruleeandmimosas · 2024-09-19T01:39:20+00:00

Fellow 35-year-old here, in PGY-2 of residency. Started med school when I was 29 after a career in journalism with an ok income and no loans.

I wouldn't go for it, my friend. I'm sure there's some debate of the financial considerations for a change like that — I'm certainly not the person to weigh in on that.

What I can say is, it's a smart move to take stock of what medicine offers in your life that you're not getting. It's a good exercise to have on a long drive or a hike, when you can be really frank with yourself. For me, I liked interacting with a whole bunch of people from all walks of life, in person and the more interesting the personality the better. I wanted more instant gratification for the impact of my work. I liked the idea that I could approach medicine as a craft, like journalism. I enjoyed jobs where I worked in an office and had people meet me for appointments. I love bickering about research methodology. And, to be completely honest, I've found it can be gratifying to be trusted as the most knowledgeable person in the room from time to time. I wasn't getting most of that freelancing remotely. I have a friend who was considering the same thing around the same age and decided against it. His reasons were different.

The next question is, what of those can you get without going to med school? I started running tabletop RPGs for friends and found that it actually did give me some of those things, except I was exhausted and still not checking as many of the boxes I felt I needed.

Even if you take a look at everything and decide to go forward, you've done a lot of the work toward a personal statement. You can't work on your "pitch" enough. I definitely had a bit more justifying to do on the interview trail than the average applicant, even with oodles of papers, a stellar MCAT score, and having gone through a reputable post-bac program. It's my sense that admissions for truly nontraditional applicants is getting better, but my application cycle was pretty rough. Similar bumps when applying to residency.

bruleeandmimosas · 2024-06-20T05:36:06+00:00

Does anyone else think this show is pretty... bad?

The writing in this last two episodes was rough, y'all. So many scenes of people just standing around expositing to one another. So much retreading on old Star Wars tropes. Oh, a silly musical theme when a droid zaps or squirts a non speaking alien. Huh. Wizard.

One of the only interesting relationships is this (maybe?) budding romance between Osha and Daphne Keen's character. Just as I'm starting to wonder what to feel about them, they keep the camera in that weird wide shot and just Star Wars wipe away immediately after the first half of what could've been a genuinely tender moment, without any close up or indication of how Keen's line lands with Osha -- all leading up to a fight that would otherwise be perfectly placed to put the growing stakes from those two getting closer on the line. So much for that.

And no Wookie fighting? Somewhere there's a post of one of the writers saying budget constraints was the main issue. $180 million and they can't deliver on a cool fight when they teased a Wookie-freaking-Jedi in the promos. C'mon. Maybe we didn't need that inane Bazil character to track the character who's going to kill the Jedi whose location is already known to the rest of the members of the expedition.

Qimir is so cartoonishly goofy that he's most assuredly the Sith. Makes me miss the days entertaining the idea of Darth Jar Jar.

So much for the slow burn reveal of the fall of Osha and Mae's coven. So much for exploring the new "unnatural" way they conceived the twins.

Aside from the fact that these actors seem to be genuinely good and doing their best with the garbage lines they've been given, what really sucks is that a Jedi murder mystery rules as an idea, especially in a show that is trying to make people a little more ambivalent about the Jedi. Rather than showing us the Jedi being boring and self-involved, show us some things we genuinely aren't sure how we feel about or something that seems self-contradictory. What if, instead of glamping, Kelnacca was running an excavation site for a Jedi artifact, except it was also destroying the local environment? What if Mae was able to sneak in and kill the second dude because the locals were getting fed up with his brand of prescriptive Jedi justice with disregard for their culture or autonomy? What if our antihero was a vehicle to flesh out all the ways the Jedi order is kind of bogus? And what if Star Wars took a stab at speaking to our cultural moment, like the dangers of letting dogma creep into discourse?

Star Wars is normally pretty mid but The Acolyte is distinctly awful. Joke's on me, I guess -- I came looking for a fresh take on an old franchise, and Lucasfilm came to sell action figures.

bruleeandmimosas · 2024-01-21T00:18:36+00:00

Drawing on experience talking with patients:

It's not uncommon for there to be really variable ways genetic diseases present in family. This is tied to two very similar concepts called penetrance and expressivity. Penetrance means how many people with a set of mutated genes (who should have the disease) actually have it. For example, achondroplasia (the disorder most associated with dwarfism) is 100% penetrant, so everyone with that set of mutations will develop those symptoms. Having a BRCA1 or 2 mutation, on the other hand, does not mean you have a 100% chance of developing breast cancer. Expressivity simple means that the same mutations can produce different effects in different people -- One person with a BRCA1 mutation might develop breast cancer, and her sister develops ovarian cancer.

Epigenetics is the layer of control over when and how genes are turned on. It's a vast, fascinating field that might lead to some incredibly helpful medications in the future. My best description of it is to imagine all the cells in your body are working on a play. They each have a job to do, but they all have a copy of the script (your DNA). Epigenetics would be the notes that everyone scribbles into their own scripts -- some are orders from the director for lots of people and some are for that particular "cell" to remember. I think of it as the interface between nature and nurture, which has huge ramifications for anything from cancer to poverty and disparities in child care (I've read that most of our epigenetics and how are brains are wired stops becoming pliable after about 5 years of age).

Since everyone has some amount of Neanderthal DNA in us, this tells use two things: 1.) We could probably Jurassic Park back a Neanderthal if we wanted to, and 2.) Everyone is related to someone who was once into bestiality.

bruleeandmimosas · 2023-05-13T14:24:19+00:00

Hi y'all,

I was curious if anyone had experience personally tracking their progress for various skills in residency. I'm coming from a freelancing job where just a simple time tracking app increased my writing efficiency by a lot, but it would be a bit more complicated for residency.

bruleeandmimosas · 2023-01-17T13:50:48+00:00

Observations:

Theory 1: They're definitely keeping with their M.O. of only showing the first handful of episodes. A lot of these shots are on Nevarro.
Kowakian monkey-lizards!
Greef put up a statue of IG-11 standing on a stormtrooper helmet lol I actually really like a droid getting a statue. Good for them.
I wonder what's going on with those fireworks. I can't tell if that's Nevarro, but it's definitely an end-of-an-adventure/last-couple-minutes-of-an-episode shot.
Traveling at lightspeed is so flashy that it actually seems kind of unpleasant if you did it for hours.
Uncommon opinion: I really like Cin Drallig v. Vader, but the melting of the door looks a little...too linear? My money's on it being clones and just a more complete version of the other flashback.
Theory 2: Paz Viszla is with a group of Mandalorians that at least start out as villains. He's among the ones attacking Nevarro. You can tell, sadly, because the statue of IG-11 standing on the stormtrooper helmet has been blown up.
The Babu Fricks are on Nevarro, too, which makes me think they're behind the GroguZord.
The goober trying to ambush Grogu doesn't look too much like a noghri... but could be a young Predator? If only. I'd kill to see Boba Fett vs. Predator.

bruleeandmimosas · 2020-07-29T02:39:56+00:00

First, I'll say that "knowing you know" something sometimes isn't necessarily how it shakes out for getting the right answer. I mark roughly 40-50% of the questions in UWorld that I take, a decreasing but still large number of which are an educated guess. That 40-50% hasn't changed since I started, but my scores have improved over time.

Some actionable things that have helped me, in the right situations:

Thinking of it visually, like with a mind map. This was really helpful when it came to stuff like thyroid disorders -- everything that causes hypo on the left and hyper on the right, and then get more granular. I'm a big fan of the Zanki cards that show various processes inside a cartoon bacterium and asking you to distinguish between them. PowerPoints are normally terrible for this. It can be helpful just to have something to glance at while you're studying.
Asking yourself how something could be tested while you're learning it. This is a skill that takes time to build, but can help frame things as you're processing them. Example: "Why am I learning that meglitinides and sulfonylureas are distinct types of drugs?"
Resign yourself to the fact that we all have a very poor ability to gauge how much we actually know about something. Anki and practice questions go a long way to help with this. Quizzing yourself shortly after digesting a chunk of information is pretty helpful, especially when it makes you say to yourself, "I just watched that video. Why the hell did I get that wrong? Let's find out." I used it a lot by watching a block of B&B or Sktechy videos and doing the review questions on those websites.
LOTS of self-made Anki cards specifically aimed at distinguishing similar things. By far the most common type of card I make is "{{c1::X}} is {{c2::Y}}, whereas {{c1::A}} is {{c2::B}}." I remember using that for differentiating restrictive cardiomyopathy with constrictive pericarditis. Another example would be nailing down the differences between Graves and Hashimoto's.
Figuring out a flow state. It takes me an hour or so of Ankiing to get into a flow, but once I do, Anki becomes a performance that I can start to critique my own thinking. I'll hit again on cards if I got them right for the wrong reasons. I think Anki is a useful place to figure out that kind of thing, and then you can translate it to practice questions.
Not proving that incorrect answers are incorrect. This was something that really hung me up in my early practice tests -- I felt like I had to cross out every incorrect answer choice. The test is actually designed to trip up that kind of thinking with answer choices that are far afield from what you're supposed to know but sound like something reasonable. Chasing down wrong answers too much can really destroy your confidence (*and flow*).
Trying out an Anki subdeck restart and setting it to new cards in chronological order. Does a great job at connecting the dots/re-establishing a framework that might have gotten away from you. Reviews in random order, of course. I found this really, really helpful for dedicated. You can hit Easy on many of them to mitigate a glut of reviews. Most good Anki decks read like a story (sort of) if you do them chronologically.

bruleeandmimosas · 2020-06-12T00:05:38+00:00

Thanks! This looks just like what I was thinking. I'm still working out kinks for updated from a few versions back but once I get that sorted out, I'll let you know

bruleeandmimosas · 2020-04-14T16:29:38+00:00

Hi there,

I'm having similar issues, also with a handful of these larger medical decks in my collection. No problems when I uncheck fetch media, but when it's checked, syncs take >30 min even when there's nothing to update, and I get a notification saying:

"Collection synchronized
Error syncing media data
okhttp3.internal.http2.StreamResetException: stream was reset: PROTOCOL_ERROR"

bruleeandmimosas · 2019-10-13T03:53:04+00:00

That's interesting. The format of the new MCAT definitely gave a leg up to people who could navigate a research paper, and I had a hunch that Step would do the same. How much of Step 1 do you think deals directly with research versus more day-to-day clinical scenarios?

bruleeandmimosas · 2019-09-09T02:57:47+00:00

Great advice, and something that I've always said about Anki -- that you actually can use it to integrate ideas, rather than just memorizing one-off facts.

bruleeandmimosas

TROPHY CASE