self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.
At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!
User ID: 454
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
1d ago
It wasn't until I was significantly older that I understood that you can't take a happy, healthy and loving family for granted, and I'm sorry yours didn't live up to your expectations.
My remaining grandfather, a similar age to yours, has always been a classic holier-than-thou ignorant religious prick and I also come from an eastern culture where filial piety is THE virtue of all virtues, and as a result everybody bent over backwards to kiss his ass and not upset him. I can't even imagine a universe where I would be in your shoes and missing my grandfather at all
My grandpa is a far better man and doctor than I can hope to be. Our cultures aren't that far apart, though filial piety isn't quite as uber alles, but nobody wishes to upset him because he's an absolute sweetheart and they'd feel terrible about hurting him haha.
It's certainly too late to expect your family to get better, but I can only hope that when it's time for you to start your own, they look back at you as fondly as I do mine. You know the things not to do, after all.
All of that to say, you are lucky to have a family that you will actually miss when you are away from them. In that sense "everything will be okay" is already your reality. The material circumstances will come and go, but being able to carry that kind of family in your heart is already the endgame ideal. You already won, just enjoy the ride.
Thank you. That's a touching way to put it. My family loves me, I'm largely safe from financial privation and I have a decent career ahead till the AIs put me out of business, I occasionally forget that I'm a very lucky person in many regards.
Good luck to you in Scotland!
As long as I stay away from the haggis, I'm sure I'll have a good time haha. Good luck to you wherever you are!
How long has it been? Did you have any discharge from your ear during the ear pain? Any decrease in hearing that has since recovered?
Short of having someone stick an otoscope in your ear, you're looking at somewhere between 3 weeks to 2 months for a perforation to resolve. I'd strongly advise against putting anything in your ear till time's you're not having issues and time's up. This might be hypocritical given my love of q-tips, but you're better safe than sorry.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
1d ago
I was initially supposed to move to the UK with my ex before she failed her exam and our relationship fell apart. I'm better off for it, she, in conjunction with work and exams, was leaving me stressed and burned out. Still, it did make the prospect of moving significantly less harrowing when there's two people to plan and commiserate with each other, or to keep each other's foibles in check.
Thankfully, through the power of online dating, I did meet someone who to my immense surprise doesn't live all that far away from the places I'll be working, though she's doing her PhD and we would have to travel quite a bit to catch up on weekends, at least till I move on to my next placement. Fingers crossed that works out 🤞.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
1d ago
You might be able to pull that off in the more urban parts of England, but I only pray that anyone who tries biking in Scottish autumn and winter, when it's going from constant horizontal rain and fog to snow, ends up in an ER that's not at my hospital. If they did, I'd probably be called in for a psych evaluation.
It's really not practical at all, and I'll inevitably need a car at some point for both the sake of work and convenience.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
2d ago
My first placement doesn't have an A&E, so I can only presume it's going to be quite quiet as hospitals go. Mostly outpatient work and I suspect that anyone particularly critical would be taken somewhere else entirely.
Of course, I wouldn't be complaining about an easy start, but that's still speculation and I might well be swamped with work. I can't imagine the rain and lack of sunlight helps with the local mood!
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
2d ago
I dream about a nice secondhand sedan, a convertible is probably ill-advised in Scottish weather haha.
Also driving is fun, get a car you like. I like convertibles.
I wonder when I'll enjoy it, right now I have few misconceptions about my skills on the road and thus an appropriate amount of anxiety. I'm doing extra classes even after I've acquired my license, but I'm still far from confident. Maybe it'll be easier in a country that has more civilized drivers with a passing acquaintance with the rules of the road, or at least lower levels of congestion. I presume once I'm there, sooner or later, I'll be able to enjoy the much vaunted Scottish countryside to my heart's content.
Still technology now makes getting in touch real-time even by video trivially easy. I just deleted a longish paragraph where I talked about the old days but no one wants to read that shit. Hug that dog.
Let's get you back to the old age home gramps ;)
Nah, I'd actually like to hear what it was like back in the day, I imagine relocation was a far bigger deal when the internet and smartphones weren't as ubiquitous. I presume you moved to Japan a good while back, and that's certainly a culture shock and a half a dozen. I speak the language, understand Scottish accents just find, and Google Maps, leaving aside questionable recommendations, does mean it's very unlikely I be utterly lost and stranded.
I will certainly keep in touch, though I know that voice and video calls aren't a good substitute for in-person comms for me, it certainly didn't quell the homesickness last time I was away.
Hug that dog
He's being hugged so hard his ribs creak and his chest aches. Or maybe that's just me.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
2d ago
It's not really feasible, I'll be working rather irregular hours, shifting every 6 months, and I don't think I'll be able to wrangle a large dog or two all by myself, especially when I'm finding my own feet there.
Further, it would be a little bit cruel, they've spent their entire lives here, and while they certainly love me the most in my family, they do love and are loved by the others in my household. My younger dog might be able to adapt, but the older one has hip dysplasia and a decade is no joke for a German Shepherd.
As far as I'm concerned, getting a dog for myself can wait till I'm done with my training, in a permanent relationship, and have firmly entrenched myself in a geographic location. Still, something to look forward to, a house isn't quite a home without a dog.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
2d ago
Pre-Terminal Blues
I'm leaving for Scotland in a week, and I have rather mixed feelings about it.
It's the culmination of several years of hard work (and a lot of waiting around), and I did match into the only speciality I wanted, psych. That being said, the prospect of leaving behind a rather comfortable, sheltered life is daunting to say the least, it's been easy for me to coast by; med school takes forever, and even when I was working, it felt more like a prelude to my "actual" professional career rather than something I had to take seriously.
The money didn't matter. I had little in the way of expenses and I lived with my family anyway. I just needed something to keep me occupied while I put my nose to the grindstone, or more productively, buried in textbooks. I never really felt I had to be an adult, as weird as that might sound.
That's about to change. It has to, when I'm crossing several oceans and a continent to find my own way, a stranger in a strange land, the diaspora of extended family rather far for comfort.
It's been a tumultuous time. For the longest time, shifting to the UK was always a problem for the future. I had exams after all, a seemingly interminable number of them. Even when I knocked them down like bowling pins and was informed I'd matched, I felt several months of euphoria from having my efforts be rewarded, and that's long worn off, with me acutely aware that time and distance are going to get in the way of the people and places I hold dear.
I won't really miss India. I'll miss the people I love in it. It's not the worst place to live, if you have money that is. Far from the best. Still, the UK represents an upgrade/side-grade, and I did have to enter training at some point, or forever feel like I'm suffocated by the shadow of giants.
I'll miss my dogs, one of them is turning ten and I won't be here for his birthday. I'm going to miss coming back home after a long day (and night) and feeling the warmth burst out of my chest when I see them waiting for me, tails a-wagging. There isn't much you can say to them to make them understand that you're going away for a long time. Possibly forever. Almost certainly longer than one of them might live. It hurts me more than it hurts them, but half of the pain is being told that the last time I was in the UK for several months, they'd always laid down by my bed or next to the stairs, waiting for my return. They'll be waiting a long time, this time.
Family? Somehow easier yet harder. My grandpa is 95. I can see the cognitive decline slowly hollow out the man I loved. His memory is no longer as tack-sharp as I recalled. He usually forgets when I'm about to leave and I remind him every other day. I listen to his long stories, both personal and anecdotes from an even longer career, and I don't interrupt, even when it's a reprise of what he's just told me yesterday. Holding his hand and sitting by his side is an opportunity drawing from an achingly finite and ever shrinking pool.
My parents will keep. I'll make sure my mom keeps on taking her Ozempic, mild GI side-effects are worth it if it potentially saves her a decade or more of her life, or at least her liver. They're doctors, and still note quite at the age where I have to seriously worry about them, they'll keep. Indians look to their own, I'm not worried, as much as I'll miss them.
My younger brother? He's going to be fine. He's made it through most of med school and while I won't be around to lose hair and pop Ritalin so I can coax him through his exams, my parents are more than capable of the same. The number of doctors in my household will rise as quickly as it fell. Cheeky bastard is stealing my gaming PC, I paid a ridiculous amount for the setup, but while I could pry out the parts with the highest $/kilo, I'm content to let him have it. My old GTX 1070 was a trooper, but he can have my slightly newer RTX 3070, though I've left off dusting my PC for a while as the price he's going to have to pay when scavenging the parts. I'll still miss him, I pity single children, the only reason they're not more lonely is that they don't really see what they're missing out on.
I'll be okay myself. Or so I hope. Any difficulties I face are done willingly, I don't have to face even a tenth of the privation or hardship the older generations in my family had to. They didn't put a silver spoon in my mouth, but it was at least anodized, and I never went hungry.
Still, it's a lot to tackle. Mostly because the NHS and the UK training schemes suck. It's hard to settle in when you have to shift shop every six months, and my first placement is a hospital in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. To give you an idea of how isolated it is, trying to navigate there with Google Maps shows an estimate of 40 minutes of walking and 38 minutes by public transport, from a prospective rental in the nearest village.
Queer isn't it? I thought so too, and I ended up double-checking. Google, in it's infinite wisdom, suggests I walk for 38 minutes to the nearest bus stop.
Which is on the hospital premises.
And from there, I board the bus that'll take me to the very distant second stop, on the other side of the hospital.
Thanks.
Anyway, this means I'll have to buy a car, and I'm still a greenhorn when it comes to driving. If I choose to rent in the bigger city, it's going to be a long commute on a highway, and I'll have to drive a ton even if I end up renting closer as mentioned, assuming I want to do things.
Even living by my lonesome seems scary. I'll be truly alone, no family or friends (at least till I make some at work), though, with the universe being nice for once, I did meet a certain someone who doesn't live all that far away. Let's see how that works out.
It'll probably get better after my initial placement. The second one is actually in a town worth the name, but six months is a long time, for all that time flies by regardless of how much fun you're having.
So much to do. So little time left to do it. The anxiety makes even an otherwise much needed month of lounging about at home seem like I'm burning precious time. I'll see if I can coax my elderly dog into clambering onto my tiny bed, even if that leaves little room for me. I need a hug, and I need to know that things will be okay.
They probably will be. Right?
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
2d ago
It's a numbers game. That's the bitter truth of it, unless you're maybe in the top 1% of men.
The answers below seem to capture the broad spectrum of possible reasons, including the most cynical (and cynicism isn't entirely uncalled for when it comes to dating). So my advice to you is to simply not dwell on it, mainly by reminding yourself there's plenty of other fish in the sea.
At least you're doing the right thing by meeting people in person, at events where there's room to socialize, it's far worse when you're merely another face and profile online. Talking to people face to face at least ensures you're the center of attention and makes them more willing to treat you like a human being, and eventually, it'll stick.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
2d ago
I'm a decent bit younger than you, but fortunately I don't really get hungover or queasy, even after far more liquor than is good for my liver (albeit maybe like once or twice a month). I suppose age will catch up to me, but at the very least hydration makes a world of difference.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
2d ago
It's good that you're cottoning on early, alcoholism tends to sneak up on you and before you know it, you're having a hard time falling asleep without a nightcap or two.
I'd estimate you're well past the 14 units that's considered "safe" (-ish) a week, so the sooner you cut down the better, before you're really dependent.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
12d ago
No, the counterfactual and associated, unavoidable assumption is:
"if a rightist made an attempt on Biden's life and the rest of the world operated precisely as I expect it to with the minimal changes necessary from reality to bring about the counterfactual reality."
You cannot divorce one from the other. You might well disagree with @2rafa or me about how reality works, and given that it's pitting one set of observations about how massive numbers of internet partisans behave against another, there's not much room to resolve it conclusively beyond what a given person finds plausible.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
12d ago
There is a time and a place for different rhetoric. Is this the proper time and place for you and cimarafa to blame right wingers based on hypotheticals? And what effect does this have?
I claim no such thing, and I invite you to quote me to show otherwise.
I don't particularly care, I'm just pointing out that it's impossible to consider counterfactuals without having implicit assumptions about the underlying dynamics of the world, which is an utterly prosaic statement.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
12d ago
The closest I can think of is that chart that compares words overwhelmingly known only by one of the two sexes. If the dataset for that was known, I'd presume you could kinda use it for the same purpose for the general population.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
13d ago
You cannot have a counterfactual without assumptions. I happen to think, given observed behavior on both sides of the political spectrum, that there would an absolutely non-negligible number of people on the Right doing the things she spoke about.
You're welcome to disagree, but it's impossible to talk about things that didn't happen without said assumptions. Criticize those, as you're doing now.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
13d ago
Err.. She's positing a counterfactual, that's not "making this up", anymore than if I say that if I went and punched you, you might punch me back.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
13d ago
The Scots eat haggis
I learned that some of the more entrepreneurial of the relatively few South Asian immigrants in Scotland invented the "haggis pakoda".
That convinced me there's such a thing as too much assimilation and fusion of cuisines.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
13d ago
Sounds about right. I remember losing hair when I had to get paracetamol for my ex and it cost me about a hundred times what I pay for it in India.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
15d ago
I was catching COVID every 6 months or so, which, if memory serves, is about as long as natural immunity persists. I spent a year as an intern in an extremely busy government hospital in questionable conditions, think rationing out one N95 every week levels, before vaccines were available. The bulk of my stint in an ICU was also before I got a vaccine, and that's with me cutting ahead of the queue as a medical professional.
Of course, as is now common knowledge, the vaccines don't prevent transmission and whatever they do for infections, it wasn't sufficient when I'm spending entire days cooped up with severe COVID cases.
Funnily enough, I could have sworn I'd caught COVID a few months back, but sadly the PCR came back negative. It felt precisely like COVID, including a day of total anosmia, but eh, could have been test error or just the flu. So I was back to work sniffling away, COVID sick leave is enshrined here, but the hospital I was working at wasn't so considerate of anything else that didn't literally leave me bedridden.
In terms of the fever you had, well, I'm not aware of anything better than paracetamol, ibuprofen or other NSAIDs. You could consider paxlovid, but I don't know how readily available that is in Japan. It's one of the only drugs that reliably works, and reduces severity and mortality. I think stocks globally are past the stage when they had to be carefully rationed out to the most morbid, but perhaps the doctors you saw didn't think you needed it. If you have the bad luck to catch it again, make sure to ask!
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
15d ago
I'm alright, thanks for asking!
I'm leaving for the UK in a few weeks, which means a lot of hectic last minute preparation and packing, and wrangling bureaucracy, which leaves less time than can be desired for Motteposting haha. I presume I'll be kept on my feet for the first few weeks once I'm there, but the perk of that is that you have more procrastination posting to look forward to!
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
15d ago
I've caught COVID 4 times as confirmed by RT-PCR, and I suspect at least 2 or 3 more times. At my age, it's not really an issue, one of the hazards of the job really, especially given that I was in an ICU at the height of Delta.
At this point, I don't bother getting tested unless I could get a comfy fortnight of sick leave. I used to fret about infecting the older members of my family, but they've made it through their own infections without much consequence, so I treat it like a new variant of seasonal flu. It's here to stay for the foreseeable future, and life has to go on.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
22d ago
For the most part there isn’t fancy brain imaging or lab tests, we ask you to name a lion on a sheet of paper and you can’t and you get a “dementia” diagnosis.
Interesting, in the UK we usually ask them to name random things lying around in the consultation room.
"Phone, pencil, underpaid idiot diagnosing me" and so on. I wager it's due to NHS budget cuts.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
23d ago
I'm probably too cynical but I think the President's job is probably a lot like a doctor's job in a hospital: the nurses all know more or less what the patient needs but they need the MD to make decisions. Sure you'd like a brilliant doctor like House for the truly difficult problems but any doctor that just did what the nurses told him to would probably make for an okay hospital.
I wish. Take it from me that's not how it works, there's certainly a lot of rubberstamping involved where you need a Magic Signature™ for medicolegal and regulatory purposes, but a hospital de-facto run by the nurses would be a disaster in short order. It's not like rushing them through a year or two of training to proclaim them Nurse Practitioners with more autonomy particularly helps, the moment things go beyond the obvious and algorithmic, there's trouble.
I'm sure /u/Throwaway05 could say much the same.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
28d ago
I am supposed to be owning the account. The NHS just needs a convenient place to send me my pittance, and the international banking system has been together long enough that there should be no interoperability concerns had they chosen a wider array of banks, I'm not asking for them to recognize the North Korean financial system, simply accepted banks that also operate in the UK.
There is plenty of downside for them, given that they'll have to scramble as well to update their records once I have an acceptable bank, and the entire system proclaims itself as being friendly to International Medical Graduates, one aspect being that they might well be internationally located when they're subject to a deluge of paperwork.
That's reassuring, while it isn't quite Mad Max where I live, traffic laws that don't have stiff fines attached to them are taken more as polite suggestions.
Luckily for me, there's a motor training school close to where I'll be renting, and given that I have to acquire an UK license eventually, I'll show up there and plead with them to help get me further up to snuff haha.
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