Day 4 & 5: Analysis of PMH

In medicine, you're always reading the patient's story from the middle of things (in medias res), and then trying to look into their past, as to how they got into this state of physical badness in the first place. With the lung cancer patient, you shrug your shoulders and say, "well, he was a smoker." For the drinkers, we shrug again, and say "of course, his liver failed." PMH/Past Medical History is our attempt to connect the dots of our patients' life events: to see cause and effect played out in astonishingly vivid tableaux vivants, where, only sometimes, do we possess the means to set things right.

This being said, here's my own PMH analysis:

"Things That Gave Me Breast Cancer"
1. Eating inadequate quantities of rare red meat.
2. Sitting too close to the TV (Oh, wait...that ruined my eyes.)
3. Getting a curly perm in 1977.
4. Getting another curly perm in 1978.
5. Living on Top Ramen, popcorn, rice and copious alcohol, in my starving student days.
6. Buying a Beta-Max, instead of a VHS.
7. Sitting in the middle seat on Southwest Airlines.
8. Refusing to waste my finite number of heartbeats on useless exercise.
9. Holding my flaming butane lighter above my head, at the finale of every rock concert. 
10. Listening to my 8-Track stereo.
11. Wearing a Mood-Ring.
12. Reading all the Fifty Shades of Grey books.
13. Watching the Fifty Shades of Grey movie.
14. Using a curling iron to make my hair look like Farrah Fawcett's.
15. Using a flat iron to make my hair look like Jennifer Aniston's.
16. Listening to the Small World theme for 8 hours/day in the summer of 1978, while captive in a Disneyland ticket booth. 
17. Drinking cheap keg beer, from a red Solo cup. 
18. Watching the entire Lost series.
19.  Wearing my Polo shirt with the collar turned up.
20. Waiting for my dial-up internet connection.

love you all.....