Monday, May 17, 2010

Fragments of a Scattered Brain

I had an interesting conversation with one of my most opinionated, liberated, and fantastically quirky good friends last week. Here are some of her statements and my non-expert opinions on them in the classic grade school true or false format:
1. Bloggers are the loneliest people in the world. (True)
2. The frequency of your blog entries is inversely proportional to the amount of real life you getting. (True)
3. The moment you stop blogging is the moment you finally get a life. (False)

It's been three weeks since my last entry about the King of Jejemons. It definitely didn't mean I got myself a life. I simply stopped blogging. Period.

*****

Teeth chattering, hair rising up on end, palpitations, cold sweats. I'm getting a panic attack.

It suddenly dawned upon me that I have actually committed myself and my entire non-life existence to the study of cardiology. For almost two years now, I have studied volumes and volumes of books, oggled hundreds of 2D-echocardiograms, deciphered thousands of ECGs, examined gazillions of patients. But until now, cardiac physiology remains to be as elusive as Kreb's Cycle. Arrhythmia is like Egyptian hieroglyphics and echocardiography is like Latin. I just couldn't get it. My learning curve has plateaued. My brain not only refuses to process new information, it also discards old ones. Now they say forgetting is supposed to be the body's means of protecting itself - an attempt at self-preservation for the ultimate survival of the species. I can make all profound, esoteric, existential excuses for my brain's failure. But the truth is oh well, it just conked out - engine sputtering, CPU hanging - just like that. Blank. Empty.

I just found it ironic how that one organ of the human body I've chosen to specialize in is the one I could never understand. Will never understand. Rather not understand.

*****

One swallow doesn't make a summer. One rose doesn't make a spring. One word doesn't make a conversation. But one word can certainly cause a newly-built wall to crumble. Snap of a finger, blink of an eye. One word. One syllable. And just like that. Everything is back to where it started.

Ugh.