After speaking with my legal counsel Mr. Katz I have decided to pull the plug on this blog. You see, starting on Friday and for the next three years, most of the noteworthy events in my life will occur as part of my professional duties as a medical resident. As such, the laws of patient confidentiality and the delirium of prolonged sleeplessness will likely conspire to prevent me from issuing any updates. Damn you HIPAA and 30+ hour shifts! I maintain the dim hope that I will still have time occasionally to read other Xangas and keep in touch with all you wonderful people, but if not please forgive me. I have greatly enjoyed blogging with you over the last nine months or so. It's been an absolute pleasure to share my frequently pointless and incredibly tangential thoughts with you. God bless.

I will leave you with a final admonition. Do not under any circumstances seek medical attention from this man:

I guarantee you he has no idea what he's doing. You have been warned.

The 25 saddest songs ever, according to the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/fridayreview/story/0,12102,1502655,00.html

Note the shocking absence of Coldplay. Back to the miserable drawing board, Mr. Martin ...

Marvin Lweis: the Phantom Menace

During my sophomore year at Rice, I was haunted by an apparition. His name was Marvin Lewis. He was not another student. He was simply a ghost in the machine. Unfortunately, the machine in question resided within the Office of Financial Aid. Due to an Office Space-worthy glitch, all of my loan money was earmarked for a Marvin Lewis, a person who, if he existed at all, certainly wasn't enrolled at the university. It took a great deal of bureaucratic gymnastics to convince the accounting gurus that Marvin was just a figment of their imagination and that Marvin's money rightfully belonged to me. Thankfully, the problem got sorted out before I had to give up a kidney to pay for the fall semester but to this day I remain wary of Marvin's shadowy avarice.

A new non-existent archrival emerged yesterday. I received a borderline hysterical message from the residency office asking why I hadn't yet applied for my Texas physician-in-training permit. Didn't I know that I couldn't start working in the hospitals next week if I didn't have proper certification from the state? I called them back and pleaded ignorance, claiming truthfully that I had been hitherto unaware that I needed to clear this administrative hurdle. They insisted I had been sent the information more than a month ago. I continued to protest my innocence. Finally, remembering my past struggles with mistaken identity, I inquired as to what name they had used to process my paperwork, and the problem became clear. All the necessary information was being routed to one Mark Lweis. Somewhere, Marvin is laughing. 

Less-than-surprising news from Salon.com:

The results of Terri Schiavo's autopsy are in, and they make one Senate Majority Leader look very foolish. According to Pinellas-Pasco, Florida medical examiner Jon Thogmartin, Schiavo's brain had suffered massive and irreversible damage; it "weighed 615 grams, roughly half of the expected weight of a human brain." Thogmartin also refuted assertions from Shiavo's parents and some members of the GOP that Schiavo could have recovered: "This damage was irreversible, and no amount of therapy or treatment would have regenerated the massive loss of neurons." But the kicker for those who tuned in to the footage of Schiavo seeming to follow the movement of helium balloons with her eyes is that the autopsy results show that "the vision centers of her brain were dead." In other words, Schiavo was blind.

Which, as blogger Nico at ThinkProgress aptly pointed out, is pretty much the opposite of what Bill Frist said in his "diagnosis" of Schiavo's condition back in March. Speaking from the Senate floor during a special late-night session, Frist disputed Schiavo's doctors' diagnosis of persistent vegetative state. "I question it based on a review of the video footage which I spent an hour or so looking at last night in my office," he said in a lengthy speech in which he quoted medical texts and standards. "She certainly seems to respond to visual stimuli."

So the stomach pain returned last night, prompting me to reopen the case files. I think I've finally solved the mystery, and here are some fun facts that I learned along the way:

Fun Fact #1 -- If you leave butter out on the kitchen counter for several days during a Texas summer, it will become rancid.

Fun Fact #2 -- If you continue to use this butter, you will continue to get sick.

Sometimes I can't believe they made me a doctor. As my legendarily acerbic Aunt Cath told me recently, "You've got a lot of letters after your name, Lewis, but you don't have C.S. -- common sense".