Red Maple

This red maple in my yard is at least 50 years old. The reason to post it is, the most beautiful year ever. The variations of color as the light changes throughout the day are amazing. Come early come late. My camera doesn't begin to show all the colors.

My Recent Book Recommendations

I have been through several books recently that I haven't mentioned yet, so here is list of my recent books that I have listened to with comments. They are listed in descending order of my strength of recommendation.


Highly recommended:
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot - This was an excellent book about the woman who unknowingly provided the immortal HeLa Cells while she was being futily treated for an aggressive cervical cancer.

The Family That Couldn't Sleep: A Medical Mystery, by D. T. Max - Its a terrific presentation of the history of research in the bizarre world of prion diseases including Fatal Familial Insomnia, Mad Cow Disease, Scrapie, Chronic Wasting Disease, CJD, Gerstmann-Straussler-Scheinker Disease and the famous Kuru. The book gives a lot of background historical information and personal history of the researchers and victims involved.


Moderately Recommended:
iWoz, by Steve Wozniak and Gina Smith - A great history of the development of the personal computer from the man himself. It was fun hearing how this history fit in with my vague memories of the coming of personal computing and my family's disastrous purchase of a 56k TRS 80 from Radio Shack.

Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science, by Atul Gawande - There were some good medical lessons which most physicians can find some way to relate to. He also wrote the book Better: A Surgeons Notes on Performance, which I think was a little better. I didn't realize at the time that I was reading them out of order going for the first book second.

Not really recommended, but not a bad way to pass the time:
A Reliable Wife, by Robert Goolrick - A steamy novel about a wealthy man living in Wisconsin who finds a wife by placing an ad in a Chicago newspaper, but she comes to Wisconsin with a plan to kill her soon to be husband. It was a little too rich for my taste but it was okay.

Courage and Consequence, by Karl Rove - The second half was a little better when he started talking things in the past that were a little more familiar to me, but I am not really a politically oriented person so I just didn't love it. I listened to it mostly to satisfy Brad. The book was mainly an elaborate defense of Bush 43. I was persuaded a little but its just not my thing.

dust bunnies, Wikipedia agrees with us.

Dust bunnies (or dustbunnies) are small clumps of dust that form under furniture and in corners that are not cleaned regularly. They are made of hair, lint, dead skin, spider web, dust, and sometimes light rubbish and debris, and are held together by static electricity and felt-like entanglement.^{[citation needed]} They can house dust mites or other parasites, and can lower the efficiency of dust filters by clogging.^[1] The movement of a single large particle can start the formation of a dust bunny.^[2]

Dust bunnies are harmful to electronics, as they can obstruct air flow through heat sinks, severely raising temperatures and shortening the life of electronic components.^[3]

Dust bunnies have been used as an analogy for the accretion of cosmic matter in planetoids.^[4][5]

Dust bunnies have also been known as beggar's velvet,^[6] and slut's wool.[

Some New Artwork

From my 5 y/o yesterday. Not bad for the decorator turned artist.

cacoepy, new word of the day

we may be cacoepists

bilateral red painful feet

Erythromelalgia

If you Google bilateral red feet, I think you will find several references to this previously unknown (to me) medical condition. If you look at e-medicine (hematology) you can see that this is the most likely diagnosis for the presented problem. Even the young doctor asked "how did you do that?".

I wish that I was as smart as a computer but I am not. But I found out that the answer to almost any thing is within our reach if we have a computer with internet access.

My cases are harder if I don't have the answer on the header.

there are clues abounding!

Interesting case of red feet

Yesterday one of the young doctors presented an interesting case to me. It had been presented to several others with no diagnosis.

A 26 year old male had acute onset of severe pain, redness and swelling in both feet several hours before presenting to a local ER. He had a MVA years ago and 12 subsequent surgeries to this leg.
He had no chronic diseases. He is a construction worker and drove a bull dozer all day. His pain was severe requiring multiple doses of narcotics without relief. Both feet were swollen and red with some extension into his lower legs.
Lab --cbc, lytes, cmp, xrays, sed rate all normal with the exception of his LDH which was double the normal value.
Questioned about resources used: "called everyone I could think of , Googled it, searched all my texts and no answer".

What is your differential dx starting with the most likely of course.

The Pothole Killer

While sorting through my old photos last night, I found this pic and couldn't believe I had forgotten about it. I took it in May 2005 from the train as we came in to New Orleans. There were still plenty of neighborhoods totally trashed by Katrina.

new favorite word--ERISTIC

eristic

\e-RIS-tik\ , adjective;

1.

Pertaining to controversy or disputation; controversial.

2.

Of argument for the sole purpose of winning, regardless of the reason.

noun:

1.

Argument for the sole purpose of winning, regardless of the reason.

2.

The art of disputation.