Bill & Melinda Gates Pledge $1.5 Million to Child and Maternal Health

From the NPR Health Blog:

Gates said that in a lot of the communities she's visited, women are very vocal about wanting access to birth control.

She doesn't think there is as much of a cultural obstacle as it might seem to some Americans.

"I actually think the biggest barrier is sometimes the American public," she said. "The way we think about reproductive rights is pretty different than the European women do or the women I meet in Africa and even the governments in Africa."

"We make it a big debate, and it really shouldn't be," she said. (Click here for Gates on birth control in her own words.)

We had a discussion about abortion in our "social medicine" class a few months ago and a few things that came up:
- when you're a doctor will you refuse to perform abortions
- is it okay to make a distinction between what you would do and what you allow of your patients
- does the debate really come down to when you believe life begins, and if it does, where is the space for a good debate?


Check out the whole article (and Melinda Gates on Birth Control) here.

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To make you think:

"No woman wants an abortion as she wants an ice cream cone or a Porsche. She wants an abortion as an animal caught in a trap wants to gnaw off its own leg (to get free)."
-Frederica Mathewes-Green

(who is interestingly, decidedly anti-choice; check out her views on her website)

More Pro-Choice Quotes here

Languages of Love

So my female friends were talking the other day about the many ways people express (and receive) affection - and someone brought up this "theory" from an apparently super famous book about the five languages of love. Then we proceeded to write them on one of the big white boards we normally use for studying drugs and diseases and tried to figure out which were the ways we expressed affection (we're not so big on the whole "love" term at the moment) and which were the ways we enjoyed receiving affection. We decided to each pick 2 for ways we express affection and 2 for ways we like to receive affection. (Can you guess what mine were?)

Here are the 5 languages of love:
1. Words of Affirmation
2. Gifts
3. Acts of Service
4. Physical Touch
5. Quality Time

It was fun to see how different we all were and to think about my friends (and past lovers) and the many ways we figure out (nor not) how to show someone -either romantically or not- how much we care about them, as well as how we learn to read someone's gestures of affection.

My parents have this amazing cartoon on our fridge of a man and a woman talking to each other - but neither of the bubbles are actually filled with text. The woman's is filled with these bubbly curvy lines, while the man's is filled with boxes and straight lines. So much frustration and hurt can be caused by not understanding the way other people show emotion. Not just affection, but fear, shame, anger. One of the doctors I worked with before medical school told me that she felt like she had a sort of 6th sense about people because she picked up on unusual signals indicating their state of being. I can definitely see how being able to read the many ways people can signal states of being would be helpful for a physician (or just in life).


A goal of mine for the week (month? year?) is to be more careful about observing the people I love, work with, or just see a lot, and figure out the ways they communicate their states of being.

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"Lovers speak is so much different
only they can understand
lets all share this coded secret
let us in, let's all join hands"
-Joni Mitchell, Lovers Speak

Whatchu Eating (now that you live in a beautiful house in the country?)

An incredible summer recipe from a friend:

Bean Salad Recipe (makes a lot!)

1 can kidney beans
1 can garbanzo beans
1 can black beans
3 c. blanched green beans (buy fresh), chopped into bite sized pieces
1 c. corn (frozen and thawed or boiled)
2 small carrots, chopped into bite sized pieces
1 medium Vidalia onion, chopped

Rinse beans and corn (if frozen, to thaw) and throw in a big mixing bowl with green beans, carrots and onion.

Dressing:
1 packet of Italian dressing mix (directions on packet, makes about 1 cup)
2 Tbsp. water
¼ c. vinegar (I use 50% rice vinegar and 50% red wine vinegar but any kind will do)
½ c. extra virgin olive oil
2-3 Tbsp. of fresh dill, chopped (optional)

Mix all dressing ingredients except oil. Slowly introduce oil while whisking to fully emulsify.

Dress and toss. Cover and let marinate in fridge over night (flavor gets better the farther in advance you make it!). Toss again and add extra fresh dill (or other fresh herbs) before serving.

Note: this is a very easy, flexible recipe that’s great for hot weather. You can change up the veggies you add and the dressing (a Dijon mustard dressing is also good). I like to keep a big batch in the fridge and add to it to keep the flavors going.

like Kevin Garnett, anything is possible

this weekend was AMAZING for so many reasons -

1. it was three days long
2. the weather was incredible
3. my family came up
4. a whole bunch of my friends/colleagues and I ran the Marathon! (many people for the first time ever)
5. I now live in the most beautiful house with beautiful people and even though we moved the day after running a marathon, friends came and helped for all of it so by the time we were winding down and the fatigue and soreness were setting in - I realized that even with all that, in that moment, it was EXACTLY where I wanted to be .

Whenever I talk to people about running a marathon (and inevitably hear them say that they could never do it and that I'm kinda crazy for doing it) I always say two things:

*unless you have some part of your body that is permanently injured, anyone can do it - you just have to train;
*it changes your idea of impossible - and that carries over into lots of other areas of your life. Once you've over-ridden the impulse to stop, to quit, to give in when you feel your whole body aching, you realize you can do that other times, with other types of pain or frustration or need.

it's pretty incredible.

I also basically did not do any work, so this week will probably not be amazing, as I try to really move into my house and try to catch up on all the work I haven't done yet, but somehow, I feel okay about it right now.


PS: My time was 3:42! but something malfunctioned about my chip...so it's not posted anywhere :( but I have lots of witnesses to my running it!

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here are a few good ones about the impossible:

It always seems impossible until its done.
-Nelson Mandela

It's absolutely impossible, but it has possibilities.
-Samuel Goldwyn

It's kind of fun to do the impossible.
~Walt Disney

higher and higher

This week has been wild and is maybe a perfect example of how medical school is crazy:

Monday: neural science exam #3, Pack up my whole house.

Tuesday: leave early from class to drive 4 hours to see the US soccer team play the Czech Republic in a pre-World Cup expo (the US lost, but it was super close until the last 20 minutes, when it looked like they just gave up). We got back at about 4am Wednesday morning to sleep for about 3 hours.

Wednesday: woke up at 7:30, for a full day of class about the visual system and blood supply to the brain, then had a meeting for this community service fellowship I was awarded with another med student this year, then my new roommates and I moved all of our stuff into our new house (just into the basement, the big move is on Monday).

Thursday: class all day about strokes, then I had my final Medical Student Leadership Group then our final team run before the marathon. Then went to see Sex and the City 2 with about fourteen women from my class. We dressed up SITC style - it was amazing.

Friday: I moved more this morning, went to lab to dissect the eyeball and learn about blood flow in the brain, we have our banquet for the marathon team tonight, then I'm going to try to get some work done and some sleep in.

Saturday: My fam comes up for the weekend to watch the marathon, I try to get a little bit of work done.

Sunday: MARATHON SUNDAY!

Monday: move from the basement into the house plus the last few things.


But the weather is beautiful, my friends are amazing (and so helpful with the moving), my family is coming up for the weekend, and we finally started to learn about sex and sleep - so I'm feeling pretty okay despite all this craziness.

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"but i feel alive and i feel it in me
up and up i keep on climbing
higher and higher and higher"

-passion pit (little secrets)

strange thoughts about the thalamus in bed

Disclaimer: we have a huge neural science test this morning, so my head's in a strange place thinking about itself... but maybe it will be interesting to get inside the crazy head of a med student the day of an exam:

This morning I woke up at 5:30 (2 hours before my alarm!) - I think because I got about nine hours of sleep the night before (though this is all exception rather than the rule for me in particular, and probably med students in general.

As I lay awake in my bed, wondering if my brain was alert enough for me to have to get up or if I could convince myself to go back to sleep, I realized that curled up on my side I was in the perfect position of the thalamus in the brain. Strange thoughts to wake up to, I know - but I've been trying to figure out the orientation of the thalamus based on the parts of it we're learning for a few days (week?) now and until that moment, I hadn't really.

So here's how you figure out the location of your thalamic nuclei while curled up in your bed wondering if you should get up. First, you have to be laying so that your right shoulder is down. This way, your head becomes the anterior nucleus of the thalamus and your left shoulder and arm become the medial dorsal nucleus (both are involved in limbic, or emotional function), your right shoulder becomes your ventral anterior nucleus (function = motor), your right arm becomes your ventral lateral/ventral intermediate nucleus (function = somatosensory), and your right hand becomes your ventral posterior medial (fcn = sensation to your body) and your right hip becomes your ventral posterior lateral (fcn = sensation to the face), and your bum becomes the pulvinar (fcn = integration of visual and auditory info), which means "pillow" and is therefore kind of fitting. Then you have the top of your spine as the lateral dorsal nucleus (fcn: emotional expression), the bottom of your spine as the lateral posterior nucleus (fcn: sensory integration, including sharp pain). Then your right leg is the medial geniculate nucleus (fcn: auditory), your left leg is the lateral geniculate nucleus (fcn: visual), and then there are the three "non-specific nuclei". I'm not quite sure where those are still, so let's call them your right foot (intralaminar nucleus; fcn: motor), left foot (medial nucleus: motor), and the sheets wrapped around you (reticular: modulation of all thalamic activity, because everything has to go through it to signal to the actual thalamus).

I feel pretty good about this metephor and hopefully it will help me out on the exam today - though it might be strange for me to keep curling into a fetal position during the test... we'll see.

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"art is an I; science is a we"
-claude bernard