The girl in the bubble

Last night's lecture at mini-med school was supposed to be on drug mechanisms, including those of Prozac, booze, nicotine, and cocaine, and I was quite looking forward to hearing about all that fun stuff and why it's dreadfully bad for you and/or therapeutic. But schedules change and interest rates fluctuate, so instead we got a lecture about microorganisms, presented by a guy with a British accent and a professed love of "House" (although, quoth'a, on the show you never do see lab technicians; instead the poor team do all their tests themselves).

You know, I'm not going to go into details about this lecture, because it ended up giving me a bad case of the squeams. I am grateful that the poor transition from color version to xeroxed black and white slides in the packet means that the horrific picture of a newborn suffering from one of the nastier side effects of C. difficile infection isn't clear enough to cause flashbacks. "You'll not sleep tonight," the cheery presenter had told us at the beginning of class; hell with sleeping, though, I didn't think I'd ever manage to eat again. Also, while it's sort of interesting to see an infected GI tract with hundreds of neatly aligned colonies of bacteria, it's not at all comforting to hear that the air around you is probably aswarm with those self-same nosocomial spores. The line for the women's room after was longer than normal, because everyone was frantically scrubbing down.

Please forgive any typos. I'm experimenting with typing this from inside a protective dome of Saran Wrap. May we all live like Boiled in Lead: "Caffeine, sugar, and THC/ Is all the doctors are gonna find in me/ When they do the autopsy./ The microorganism won't get me."

Now 'scuse, I must go wash my hands again some more.