My third year of college is officially over. This weekend is graduation for the seniors, and it makes me feel like college has gone by way too fast. In another blink, it'll be all over. The last two weeks had been pretty hectic, so I didn't really have time to think about my upcoming birthday or my quickly closing college career. I didn't update the site because I was working on various papers and studying for exams. Of the grades I've gotten so far, I ended the semester on a high note. But there are still quite a few grades I haven't seen yet. I think that, overall, finals went pretty well. I finished up finals on Wednesday, and turned 21 later that night at midnight. I went home to Dearborn and spent the night with Mark and Kyle. We went to Bailey's at midnight, and let me tell you, Bailey's in Dearborn on a Wednesday night...not a very exciting place to be. I didn't mind too much though. It was nice to catch up with the guys. The next day I came back to Ann Arbor for the 21st celebration with my roommates, who had also just finished their semesters up. Good times all around. I'll put up some pictures when I have time, but that won't be for a few days because I'm off to Myrtle Beach with Jess in the morning. I'll be back on Wednesday, so sometime soon after, I should be posting pictures of my birthday and vacation.

Then I start applying to medical schools and volunteering in a research lab for the summer. I'll also be shadowing a doctor for one day a week in Dearborn, and looking for a part-time job in Ann Arbor. If I can get some basketball and biking in as well, it should be a good summer.

This article in the op/ed section of the NYTimes is pretty interesting. It talks about how over-hydration can kill you during strenuous exercise. Ironically, it can create symptoms that many people think are symptoms of dehydration, so more fluids are administered, sometimes leading to death.

This isn't really the same thing, but I always wondered why scientists say if you're thirsty, you're already dehydrated. You are supposed to drink even when you're not thirsty. I don't know much about that, but I wonder if they're really right, or what exactly is meant by "dehydrated." If you should be drinking before you're thirsty, wouldn't evolution favor those that got thirsty just a little bit earlier? For millions of years we've been drinking when we were thirsty, but now that's not good enough? If I have time, I'll find out more.

I found these pictures of graffiti on Flickr. The link is to one guy's folder that has some of the coolest pictures of graffiti I've seen. The folders on the left of San Francisco graffiti and LA graffiti are definitely worth a look too. I think he uploads pictures frequently, so the main page might change but the folders on the left should stay. That reminded me of some of the street art and murals I saw on my class trip to spanish harlem in high school. I looked for pictures tagged "murals" and found another nice folder of neat street art. Enjoy.

Wow...I wonder if I could handle this...I don't know what else to say, but read it.

This article about the Arkansas football team is pretty ridiculous. Someone was offended that a college team made the slackers wear pink jerseys at practice because it is the color used to represent breast cancer survivors. Now we have to start watching what colors we wear? Maybe our troops will take offense to the yellow jersey in the Tour de France because it associates them with France. I don't really get the logic.

My dad mentioned this story and I found it sort of interesting. The NYTimes reports that House majority leader Tom DeLay, "a driving force behind the Congressional effort to spare Terri Schiavo's life," had removed his father off life support in the past. His father was apparently on a respirator. The president of the Family Research council defended DeLay, saying "Two different situations. With Terri Schiavo, there was no plug pulled, there was no respirator taken away from her. She was simply by court order deprived of food and water." Strange. I guess it's okay to deprive someone of air, but not food or water. Anyway, here's the story, it's short. Link.

Has our country become obsessed with litigation? The number of lawsuits filed against doctors has been steadily rising. Lawyers claim these suits aren't frivolous, that there are many more lawsuits that could have been filed. They often point to a 1999 study by the National Academy of Science's Institute of Medicine that claimed 44,000 to 98,000 Americans die every year because of preventable medical errors. On the other hand, a new study recently published by Harvard claims that only 1 in 6 medical malpractice claims have any merit. Also:

"This detailed study concluded that there was no relationship between the presence or absence of negligent care and the outcome of malpractice litigation. The severity of the injury--not negligent care--was the main factor associated with a malpractice award."

Right now I'm trying to read a book called Forgive and Remember. It is about surgeons and the errors they make during and after training. It also focuses on how different kinds of errors are treated within the medical field. I'll try and post more about it once I read more of the book. So far, it emphasizes that surgeons (and other doctors as well) are destined to make errors. That can't be avoided. The question is then: what errors are unforgiveable? Not so simple.