Just What The Doctor Ordered

  How many of you watch(ed) Scrubs, ER, House M.D. Grey's Anatomy, or any of those other types of hospital shows? The biggest thing I hear is, "Oh, those are just TV shows, hospitals aren't really like that." And it's true, I'm pretty sure House would have lost his license a long time ago, and most of Scrubs is negligible.

An eagle of lies!

I think the worst I ever saw was an ad a couple of weeks ago at a bus stop. The poster said something along the lines of how even if his superiors think he's wrong, he doesn't give a damn. It was basically a House knock-off, but instead of seeing edgy and full of wit (and let's be honest, Hugh Laurie), the first thing that came to mind was, "That guy cannot possibly be a good doctor, and would probably be fired within the first day."

Not Pictured: 12 years of medical training

  So where do we go? When someone you know wants to be a doctor, how do you explain that it's not "as seen on TV"? Well I don't write a blog on the interwebs for nothing! I have links of course!

I can't remember how I got into these. Maybe it was though the "Next Blog" button at the top of blogspot if you have an account. It could have been through I Love Charts or someone I follow on Twitter. I know I at least started with Doc Cartoons and the link-hopped from there. I've kind of become obsessed with doctor blogs in the past week or so. Doctors don't scare me for the most part and I'm always interested in looking through the windows of people who spend 12 years or more of their life working to (hopefully) help people. I also love science, and you can get more science than being a doctor.

I know that there are a billion of sciences, please don't hurt me.

A Cartoon Guide to Becoming a Doctor: This isn't always a cartoon guide, a lot of the posts, as well as most of these blogs, are stories from her day at work. Dr. Fizzy, is pretty funny, but I don't think she's had as much experience as Dr. Grumpy. The cartoons she puts up are from her days as a resident/in med school rather than current, but they're still fantastic. The blogs she writes are either anecdotes from med school or what's going on currently.

Doctor Grumpy in the House: Dr. Grumpy is a neurologist, and he's definitely one of the more interesting blogs out there. I don't know how old he is, but he's got a ton of experience and has been doing this blog for close to two years now. He doesn't talk about his training or med school, but rather just absurd stories from his day, usually after they happen, so you get around 3 or so a day, which is neat.

Anonymous Doc: Anon is kind of the darker side of medical school. Dr. Fizzy makes things sound tough, but not terrible, and Doctor Grumpy has already settled into his career. Anon tends to complain and he's a bit long-winded, but I still like them because they're honest. A lot of what he writes is scary, regarding the medical world from a professional standpoint, but it's fascinating anyway. He definitely stands out from the rest in the fact that he'll post full dialogues between himself an a patient, which is always remarkable. I'm always impressed by him and Dr. Grumpy in their ability to remember conversations with patients hours later, but I suppose remembering a lot of things is part of their job.
Edit: I guess he's in that middle ground because he's a resident with interns, but at the same time he's out of medical school and can't afford to make mistakes whatsoever now. He's just kind of an angry person, which occasionally seems overwhelming.

Action Potential: I don't understand the name, but maybe it's some medical reference. Regardless, this is one of my favorite blogs to read, probably because she's still in med school. She's a first year and writes multiple times a day. I think I enjoy her blog so much because she's not that much older than I am (four years isn't really much) so I can identify with her. It also helps a lot that she's still in school, whereas everyone including Anon is at least in residence, if not a full-fledged doctor. She's what I imagine Hyperbole and a Half would be like if Allie was in medical school.

  These are just some of the blogs out there. I'm trying hard to keep this list short because I'm working on catching up on all of them and I literally discovered Anonymous Doc while reading Action Potential/working on this post and read a couple of pages to see if it was worth adding (it is, obviously). Blogs are worse than comics because comics are short and very rarely have that many links, but the blog websites are all about sharing your blog with others, so if you have a blog and comment on one of these blogs, I've clicked on your name (probably), or you're linked on the side of the page and all hell breaks loose. I literally just got the amount of things I wanted to read down to three tabs in a single window (this past week has been about three windows with 5 tabs each). Obviously I have a choice, but sometimes I can't not read fascinating things!

Mentally Cracked

  You've probably noticed I link to Cracked every so often.

Look, I did it again!

Just for fun, I decided to go back and add a picture. From the future!

I don't mean to spam pictures, but I decided I needed to meta-blog.

  I absolutely loved Cracked, as anyone who's facebook friends with me will tell you.

So that's why it's called Cracked.

Anyway, a question I get from a lot of people (see: one, occasionally two) is, "Why don't you go write for Cracked? You read it enough and you're style has become basically the same."

  I'm sitting here at 2 am thinking about that as usual, and I realize, it's because I don't know anything. Take what I'm reading right now for instance. I don't know anything about wars, technology, movies, any of that stuff. I know obscure things, like Norse mythology and comics. There are a few things I would consider posting, like my Widgets for America post, but it's already been written, and in the writer's forum they ask that you just link to your blog, rather than post it on both because they technically buy the rights from you. Soren Bowie writes blogs, but he's one of the head writers, so I don't think you can just submit a blog like his. Beginners either write for the Funny pages or submit the listed articles like I linked to above. C'est la vie I suppose.

Red Ring of Ragnarok

This whole, '11 thing is messing me up.

  So last weekend, Friday, I was obsessively refreshing my Amazon account to see if Red Dead Redemption had been delivered yet. It did, and I got home that evening to boot up the game and allow badassery to commence. I was trying to be calm and not rush into it, I even finished my Twitter blog! I get my xbox 360 set up and whatnot, load the game into the system, get it installing the update off the CD aaaaaand... Error 79. I looked it up, I played around with the thing, and the best I could come up with was Youtube telling me to basically tear it to shreds and rebuild a ghetto Million Dollar Man at the cost of 20 cents. The thing is shot and I'm pretty sure the fans are dying, so I put it on eBay and got a new one. It's fancy, because they put the fan on top where it hopefully won't get blocked, which you think would have been a good idea in the first place. The price also came down by almost a hundred bucks and it's got 230 more gigabytes. I'm not trying to sell the 360, I just like how this is 3 years later, and I'm probably a year or so away from the next xbox system. The trouble is, I can't imagine what I'm going to do with 230 more GB. I wasn't even close to filling the first hard drive. Also, I've developed a ridiculous case of pre-buyer's remorse. I don't regret buying the console, I like it, it's just that I'm worried that I'll develop buyer's remorse. Because that is how I roll.