Patricia Foo's Blog

Rice pudding and delicious travels to come

It's about time I got around to adding a "Food" category. Anyone that knows me well knows that this category should have existed from the very beginning.

]]> For me, cooking has always been a therapeutic activity. Always is a little bit of an overstatement. I didn't really start cooking until I moved into my first "real" apartment in New York. So it's been about two years now, but actually less, since I've never been a consistent cook (cooking something every day) despite my love of it. I am, though, finally starting to move into my freeform/experimental phase of cooking -- still a heavily recipe-driven cook, but I feel more and more comfortable throwing things together based on whatever is in my fridge/pantry and making substitutions in recipes. And sometimes I even imagine that I can invent good taste combinations based on my palate alone.

So my goals in creating a "Food" category are two-fold: to share delicious recipes and to proffer good restaurant tips. I've always been bad about actually downloading and getting pictures from my camera onto a computer, so I can't promise that pictures of recipe results will make it onto this site...but if I ever have a large chunk of free time and some creative perseverance, I will try.

To inaugurate this phase of my blog, here's an easy, simple, and delicious recipe for coconut rice pudding: http://www.elise.com/recipes/archives/001427rice_pudding.php

Just substitute coconut milk for the whole milk. I also used regular white granulated sugar instead of the brown sugar (following a comment made on the recipe) and it turned out great. You could try the brown sugar though. You might notice that this rice pudding recipe is more of a traditional pudding formula, using eggs. I personally like that. But I suppose maybe it's not a traditional rice pudding recipe.

Oh, and the other part of this blog entry title? I'll be taking off a week from Wednesday for my summer project in India. (Hence, "delicious travels.") I'll definitely be jotting down lots of thoughts and impressions while I'm there, and I'll try to get some of those up here too.

No time for reasons

When I was interviewing at a school in the midwest more than a year ago now, my faculty interviewer commented on the "overly metaphoric" nature of my personal essay. I had opened that essay and thus my medical career through the lens of a seventh grade frog dissection.

]]> Pursuing the metaphor, I wove in snippets from my dual scientific and service backgrounds, uniting my previously disparate interests with my desire to "dissect," or to fundamentally understand and empathize. For me, medicine was to be the synthesis following this dialectic.

Little did I know how much sheer volume of "fact" I needed to acquire in medical school. (I put fact in quotation marks, because I believe that any well-trained scientist has a healthy skepticism about the fixed truth of any finding.) Thus began in earnest our course in Health and Human Disease, otherwise known as HHD, or in other schools as an organ-based system. We're wrapping up our first full block (Pulmonary) at this moment, and these last days running up to the exam have caused me to reflect on my deviation in learning motivation and behavior from my original intent to "dissect" disease processes down to the mechanism (which, I'm finding, is often not well understood anyways). Instead of always probing to understand the mechanism as I did in my molecular and chemical biology courses in college, I find myself more and more content these days to understand "key," "high-yield" terms that are associated with different diseases. Why are they associated? Often, the question doesn't even occur to me. I find myself too busy trying to make the many necessary associations and to compile the large volume information into an organized system inside my mind.

In some ways, this is a sad turn of events. But I think it's a reality of medicine, and especially of first-year medicine. I'm sure that over the years, I'll layer a more nuanced understanding of diseases on top of my "high-yield" knowledge, and that in the future, if a disease particularly captures my attention, I will actively participate in the dissecting research process to create new understandings. For now, though, there's simply no time to ask why.

California sunshine

I find that I tend to blog only in stressful times or when I have a serious topic on my mind. But in reality, that's not what my life is like all or even most of the time. Thus, in an attempt to provide some balance, I've decided to make a conscious effort to blog about happy, light-hearted thoughts too.

]]> For example: Great things about living in California --
1. Today, the high was 60 with lots of sun. It felt like May on the East Coast -- except it's still February.
2. You can pretty much bike to class (or anywhere) all year round. I haven't yet been stymied in my biking (although I do still need to get mudguards...)
3. Want snow? Drive to Tahoe over the weekend and spend the weekend learning to snowboard in 40-50 degree sunshine (I was sweating wearing a t-shirt and a thin fleece), all with an amazing view of the lake and mountains.

These are just examples from the last 2 days. I'll try to remember to add to it over time. I can see how one gets addicted to living here.

Standards

Amidst all the factual learning (or memorization, some might call it) that happens in medical school, I find myself often distracted by softer questions. Morality, biases, standards, death...often weighty topics for which I haven't yet found a good forum for contemplation or discussion. Most recently, the two topics that came about in thought and in conversation were standards and biases.

]]> By standards, I mean the moral, mental, and physical standards to which doctors and indeed all health providers are held. In a spirited discussion among several generations of my classmate's family, the essential point in question was: is it reasonable to hold doctors to a higher level of standards for behavior? Do we expect our doctors to make fewer mistakes than the average professional (laywer, stock broker, etc)? Do we expect them to be more moral? To be both more human (in their ability to care for patients) and less human (in their flawless treatment records)?

This is a set of questions that has remained unsettled in the back of my mind for years. In my mind, it has always accompanied similar questions regarding the tension of whether medical care is a social/moral imperative or an economic good. (Which is obviously not an and/or choice, but rather a balance whose tipping point can have significant policy implications.) How much of medicine lies beyond the usual transactions of society and falls within some realm of higher morality?

I don't know what the answer to these questions is. At this point in my career--the very bottom of a long ladder--it does, however, lead me to contemplate the selection process of future physicians. Is this why we have this image of pre-meds as the color-coding-crazy, detail-fixated perfectionists? Are these desirable traits for individuals from whom we will later expect nothing less than perfection on the operating table?

A week or so ago, in my semi-futile attempt to keep up with current events, I read Steven Pinker's article in the NYTimes Magazine about recent research into the biological underpinnings of morality and its implication for our societal interpretation of morality. I found the following quote particularly apropos:

"There are many other issues for which we are too quick to hit the moralization button and look for villains rather than bug fixes. What should we do when a hospital patient is killed by a nurse who administers the wrong drug in a patient’s intravenous line? Should we make it easier to sue the hospital for damages? Or should we redesign the IV fittings so that it’s physically impossible to connect the wrong bottle to the line?"

Is Dr. Pinker right?

No regrets, no edits

Today was the first day of my second quarter of med school. And yes, this is my first "real," non-introductory entry. For this, I apologize.

]]> At first, I regretted not blogging during winter break as I had planned to, while lazing away at home or in my friend's apartment in Japan. What a perfect time to reflect on not just the previous quarter, but on the actual initiation into the culture of medicine. I could finally produce the well-constructed, thoughtfully composed entries that I had started but not completed on a few occasions to reflect on the meaning of writing in medicine, on my perception of the culture of medicine, and so on.

Then it was today and all of that careful planning went out the window.

Surprisingly, given my "shoulda" tendencies, I have no regrets about this blogging omission. And no desire to heavily edit this entry into a perfect work of graceful insight.

Instead, I'm happy to honestly share the experience of coming back to medical school, after first quarter and my first, truly relaxing and perhaps over-refreshing break.

People often make the analogy between med school and trying to take a sip of water from a fire hydrant. In that world of analogies, today was like walking down the street and suddenly, with almost no warning, falling into a manhole.

In my three weeks of blissful relaxation among my dearest friends, I had forgotten -- or maybe blocked out -- the frenzy that is med school. And now, I'm back in the thick of it after only 4 hours of class. Pulmonary exam, health policy...just a few hours is enough to fill your head with a week's worth of thoughts.

It's easy for every day to seem like a week here. But with this new resolve to blog more and edit less, I hope to resurface more often and give you my raw, in-the-moment impressions and questions. Please check back.

The About Me Entry

We of the Friendster, AIM, Facebook, MySpace, blogging generation have become adept at answering the perennial, electronic "About Me" question. Or at least, we should have. And yet, confronted again with this question, I find myself turned-around by a multitude of things that could be said, that should be said, that won't be said...

]]> Since it's impossible to encapsulate a whole person in an "About Me" blog entry, let me instead present you with some basic biosocial facts. Consider them the briefest of introductions to my blog.

born: Wynnewood, PA (suburb of Philadelphia)

childhood: in two houses in Wynnewood, about 5 minutes apart from each other

prior education: Lower Merion High School, Harvard College (Biochemical Sciences)

other personal points of interest:
-Lived in NYC for two years between college and medical school
-Love cooking & food, reading fiction (and getting into non-fiction), running