how could i have forgotton?


last friday, this ent cancer surgeon who used to be a student of prof raj(who isn't?!) and raj senior came to give us a talk on the anatomy of the head and neck. since he's a cancer surgeon, he spends his time opening up necks and jaws to remove cancerous growths. and since he does so much damage in the process he has to reconstruct the jaw using bones from the forearm and leg. the pictures he showed us were awful, and it wasn't just terrible to look at. i just felt so sorry for the people who had to go through all these just so that they could live. the surgeries usually involve removal of the jaw, so in the photos all you see is a big, bulbous red mass where the lower jaw used to be. it's something you have to see for yourself; no amount of description and imagination can give you the right picture.


and it made me think as well. the surgeon could laugh it off, and he was very happy to show us the pictures, and i thought, so this is what being a surgeon does to a person isn't it? having to distance yourself from the gore and grotesqueness of your handiwork, so you joke about it. maybe that's why there're fewer women in surgery. being able to help is one thing, but having to make that first cut knowing that you'll be making a huge hole in a person's face is another.


fyi, those people he showed us did make good recoveries. using flesh and bone from the arm, he made them new necks and mandibles, and they can now function normally again.


and, i spent almost an hour printing those damn notes. can't they just standardize it to powerpoint so that i can print six slides to a page and not two?! and can somebody teach the lecturers how to resize picture files so that we don't get thirty one meg files to download?! i chalked up over seventy-three megs of downloads in one a half hours yesterday; i'm scared to see the next bill.