But one article caught my attention and I couldn’t help but click on it. It told of the two pilots who were ordered to intercept Flight 93. Back in 2001, there were no fighter jets that were armed and ready to take off to intercept planes. It was a different time.

When the order came to intercept Flight 93, the two pilots, Lt. Heather Penney and Col. Marc Sasseville, could not wait for their planes to be armed. They took off with only 105 lead-nosed bullets and the knowledge that those bullets wouldn’t do the job.

From the article:

“It was decided that Sass and I would take off first, even though we knew we would end up having to take off before our aircraft were armed,” Penney, among the first generation of American female fighter pilots, said to C-SPAN.

Penney said each jet had 105 lead-nosed bullets on board, but little more.

“As we were putting on our flight gear … Sass looked at me and said, ‘I’ll ram the cockpit.’ And I had made the decision that I would take the tail off the aircraft,” Penney recalled.

Both pilots thought about whether they would have enough time to eject before impact.

“I was hoping to do both at the same time,” Sasseville told the Washington Post. “It probably wasn’t going to work, but that’s what I was hoping.”

Penney, a rookie fight pilot, worried about missing her target.

“You only got one chance. You don’t want to eject and then miss. You’ve got to be able to stick with it the whole way,” she said.

The pilots chose their impact spots in order to minimize the debris field on the ground. A plane with no nose and no tail would likely fall straight out of the sky, its forward momentum halted, Penney said.

I read the article and was just amazed and reminded about what our men and women in uniform are willing to do for us each day.

Source: MSNBC.com

Meet Miss South Carolina. She was just recently crowned and she is planning to compete in the Miss America pageant in January of next year. She is a fitting pageant winner for this generation. Before she won her crown she lost over 100 lbs over 3 years. Her secret? Diet and lifestyle changes. Hard work. No easy way out. No surgeries. Just a commitment to getting healthier.

Her pagenat platform is “Eating Healthy and Fighting Obesity.”

I’ll be rooting for her to go all the way.

For more on her story, you can check out the MSNBC article here.

I don’t know what she was thinking. A quote from the news story:

“If I could do it differently, I would, because I certainly miss my son, and I think about him every day and I wish he could be with me and my family,” she said.

Labrie, handcuffed in the courtroom, after receiving he sentence. Photo Credit: Cheryl Senter/AP

But for whatever reason, she stopped giving his medication.

Source: MSNBC.com – Mom who withheld son’s cancer meds gets 8-10 years

Edit: For some reason MSNBC removed their news clip talking about the smoking baby. I found another clip of him from YouTube, this one without any news commentary.

Edit: And now YouTube has removed the video. So here is another one from Break.


EMBED-Ardi Rizal - The real SMOKING BABY !! - Watch more free videos

6. here will be weeks you’ll forget you even have a boyfriend—friends will ask how he is and you’ll say, “What? Who? Oh….right. He’s well…I think.”
3. Learn to hide your “ew, gross” reactions when they tell you all the stuff you never wanted to know about your bodily functions.
1. Don’t expect to see them. Ever.

Source: FoxNews.com

Sometime last year there was an article about students posting inappropriate things on Facebook and having to deal with administrative consequences from their school or lose out on a job because some potential employer decided to check up on the job candidates online.

Well in this latest story, medical students across the country are getting reamed for being inappropriate on Facebook. What kinds of things? Offenses included “posting unprofessional content online, including photos of drug paraphernalia and violations of patient privacy.” Even posting YouTube videos of practical jokes with a cadaver.

While I agree that medical students should conduct themselves appropriately with the dignity expected of someone in the profession and that some of the offenses should never have taken place (like being disrespectful with a cadaver or violating patient privacy), I will point to one section of the article:

Medical students are no different from other young adults, said Anastasia Goodstein, a San Francisco-based marketing expert who tracks youth trends on her Ypulse Web site. The generation that first embraced social networking still considers Facebook merely a way to connect with friends.

“Now they’re waking up to the reality of older people and people with authority over them, like deans, seeing their Facebook pages,” Goodstein said.

And I don’t mean to point that part out to make an excuse for the behavior, but just to offer an opinion (that isn’t necessarily mine) from the other side.

However, I do strongly believe that all patient-identifyng information should never be posted online. And that was a line young and old never have a right to cross.

Oh, and one part of the article kind of pointed out something else. One medical student was in trouble for friend-requesting a patient on Facebook. I understand the ethical dilemma. We discussed this in class — that physicians and patients need to keep the relationship professional. But as Facebook has become more and more commonly used as a means to communicate (in addition to staying in touch with friends), I think this is a gray area.

Why can’t doctors add patients as a facebook friend? Is it because the patient will be exposed to the physician’s less guarded, non-professional moment? Or what if the physician had a dedicated professional account? Anyways, not everyone who is a “friend” on Facebook is really a friend (i.e. people who add/approve anyone regardless of whether or not they know them personally).

And now, I must go dig through both this blog’s archive and my twitter account and selectively purge entries…. lol Kidding. Kind of.

*****
On a side note, I had a lecture today where the lecturer said that he doesn’t believe there is an answer to our healthcare problems. Government’s solution is to try something we aren’t doing and see if it works. He noted that in the UK, there is also a healthcare debate with the National Health Service (NHS) and the British government is inviting American insurance companies to discuss ways to try something different (more like the American system) which will allow people to opt out of NHS coverage. Food for thought…

um… yeah.. very good example of patient care focused on patient safety… (Sarcasm. I hate that I have to put this, but I am paranoid that if I don’t, this Internet post is going to come back and bite me in the future.)

I thought US Resident Physicians had it bad with our 80 hour/week cap (which isn’t as strict as some would like). But 80 hours of work without rest? That’s just downright ridiculous!

Maybe the guys in charge down under think that their doctors are super-human…

Ok, ok… so they admit that there is a doctor shortage. And they need more doctors. I guess it’s a good thing for foreign graduates who have an interest in working there.

Personally I have thought about working there in Australia after I finish training here. But I would not want to have to do an Australian residency in addition to my US one…

Source: Army doc, 74, ready to deploy to Afghanistan – Military- msnbc.com

Dr. John Burson

Photograph by John Bazemore / AP

*****

I just read this story over at MSNBC. It seems pretty crazy. Seventy-four year old ENT surgeon is getting ready to ship off to Afghanistan for a deployment with the Army.

I wonder what I’ll be doing when I’m 74 — of course, that’s assuming I do live that long. It’s hard to say these days. I’m not trying to sound suicidal. I just mean that there are so many unknowns. Nobody can really know how long they are going to live for.

But this whole story got me wondering about the Military Medicine system. I’m just wondering: Don’t they have any younger doctors? Is the situation that bad?

I suppose this could just be because the guy really loves deploying. I mean, it sounds like he does have fun with the excitement. I just hope it isn’t because our military is so desperately thinned out by this ongoing war that we have to resort to sending senior citizens into war zones when they should be enjoying retirement.

I just read this article on MSNBC (link above). It’s pretty crazy. And I thought medical school was hard for me. The article tells of 20 men and women who are the first medical school graduates in the country of Somalia in almost two decades.

The students literally risked their lives to attend medical school. One student recounts becoming trapped under crossfire almost seven times during his commutes to the university. Another two of their classmates were actually gunned down recently.

What a story of dedication. I don’t think I would have the will or the passion to attend medical school in those types of conditions.

I admire these people. I don’t know what motivated them. Maybe they all have a desire to help the thousands of Somalis that are in desperate need of healthcare. Maybe each person found their strength in different places. But they are now equipped to help fellow-countrymen in the war-torn country of Somalia.