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Gay Medical Mnemonic Fiction - Neurology
PEDIATRIC
Rett Syndrome
General: neurodegenerative disorder, affects only females
Clinical: stereotypic hand movements (hand wringing), acquired microcephaly
[MOVING IN]
When I was fifteen I had a friend and my friends’ name was Lively. We talked about our lives, which consisted of a lot of studying on my part and exams, vacations, flirting, even minor illness on hers. Over that year, she was seriously courted by at least two guys.
She described their advances to me in detail, perhaps in the hope that she might get me jealous enough to make a move on her. But I was honestly more interested in the guys than her. I was fascinated by their love-sick attempts to woo her and by their machinations to get in her pants.
I was amused, though baffled by her interest in me and appreciated her attention, but I ultimately saw her as nothing more than just a friend.
Lively was beautiful - even I could appreciate that - and apparently, like many beautiful girls, she yearned to make something of her beauty; display it, have it seen, appreciated, before it faded and ultimately vanished; and Lively achieved just that. She auditioned for and got the part of Scarlet in the sequel to ‘Gone with the Wind’.
Although she was quite taken with me, she also became infatuated with her co-star, the guy who would be playing her love interest, Rett Butler. The guy was admittedly talented but had an impossibly small head relative to his body!
But what she didn’t know was how sexed up that guy was. One evening he casually suggested that they rehearse at her home. When they were alone in her bedroom, it became obvious from his hand wringing that he was under much nervous tension which stemmed from his indecent ulterior motives. He asked if he could take a quick shower and emerged from the lavatory with nothing but a plush towel over his loins. His nervous hand wringing turned to attempts at heavy petting and fondling of his co-star, but eventually his advances were rebuked.
Anyway, my friendship and awkward ‘courtship’ with Lively lasted long but it eventually ended when I finally told her that I did not like girls. That revelation caused the life to drain from both our voices. In subsequent conversations I became more daring; I went on to mention that there was a particular guy I was interested in. The guy's name was Andrew; he was of short stature but with a solid frame. He had rugged good looks and an angular face with a solid jaw and a shot of dirty blond hair across his forehead. He dressed in earth tones and liked sporting scarves around his neck. He was a man's man, the kind of guy that might appear in a Marlboro ad. Perhaps I was not as considerate as I should have been when I decided to go into details with Lively about my crush. She seemed to take my revelations in her stride but it’s possible that she was crushed inside.
That’s what I was thinking as I walked through Aardvark’s Johnston gate, perhaps because I was hoping to leave behind my somewhat reticent past and indulge in wild debauchery as I began my academic life, blossom as a man and come into my own, so to speak, sexually...
I was, after all, an Aardvark medical student, an Aardvark man, an Aardvarkian! I was allowed some amount of self-congratulatory sex, was I not?
Krabbe’s Disease
Autosomal Recessive
Galactocerebrosidase deficiency → accumulation of galactocerebroside in multinucleated histiocytic cells (“globoid” cells) in degenerating white matter in CNS
Just that day there was a story in the ‘Crimson Tide’, the Aardvark daily paper, concerning a widespread crab infection among the Aardvark student body. Apparently the boys were contracting it by rubbing their ‘globoids’ together. I know that guys need to get off but they’re obviously overdoing their Princeton rub so much that it should be renamed ‘the Aardvark rub’...
HEADACHE
In any case, my feelings of self-importance soon dissipated during my first Q&A session in the office of our Professor of Hematology.
Tension Headache
General: most common headache
Clinical: frontal / occipital / bilateral tight band-like headache, tightness of posterior neck muscles
Assn: stress
Tx: stress reduction, Acetaminophen / NSAID, muscle relaxants
He wanted to instruct us on common conditions he told us we’d see in our daily practice, so he started with the differential diagnosis of headache.
Thankfully, a few days ago one of Professor Hansen’s neighbors, a senior medical student, Dean, had taught me a few things about tension headache so I was up on that.
Dean was a tall, handsome, man. He had beautiful pale-blue (but not stone-cold) eyes, interesting up-slanting eyebrows with a vertical dramatic furrow between them (that was likely the result of his own inner tension) and perpetually moist, cherry-red lips. His soft, brittle, thinning hair and rounded face gave him a sweet disposition that rather balanced his manly nature and made him a veritable ladykiller.
He was one of those guys who you think may never have entertained a single gay thought in their entire lives. Well, he sort of paid for that...
And he was always fidgeting. He was filled with this maculine nervous tension. To dampen it, he availed himself of the marijuana plant, as I learned from Dr. Hansen. He also expended it on his live-in girlfriend, who I honestly thought was beneath him, not only in the sexual positioning sense, but also socially as well as in the looks department. To begin with, she was chubby... and she got even chubbier...
What I mean by that and what I alluded to above, is that after I left Floridisle, I heard from Dr. Hansen (who made a point of knowing everything about everyone), that Dean had managed to impregnate the female and was now planning a shotgun wedding. I couldn’t help but think how long it would be before they divorced…
Migraine Headache
Etymology: Gk. hemikrania, from hemi- "half" + kranion "skull" (although 40% are bilateral)
General: genetic predisposition, related to menses, emotions, cheese, caffeine, chocolate, alcohol
Clinical: usually unilateral, throbbing headache, mostly women, 4-72 hrs, aura, scintillating scotoma
Tx: Sumatriptan, Ergotamine (for acute attacks)
Prophylaxis with Propranolol, Valproic Acid, Methysergide (for > 3 headaches / month)
'Tell us what you know about migraine headaches' boomed the voice of the Hematology Professor. Thankfully, I was also well-versed in migraine headaches because it so happened that Professor Hansen had a familial predisposition to migraine headaches and had told me all about the disease. For example, whenever he ate his beloved hard cheese at night, it would trigger a migraine!
He revealed this to me one night when he took me to the movies. I was touched that he confided in me but immediately he told me to hush because the movie was starting. That's how he was all the time; alternatingly hot and cold - it made it very difficult for anyone to truely get close to him. Just when you thought you had made some leeway with him, he turned and did something cruel. It was almost as if he was afraid to let people get close to him, although he was the one to approach people initially, usually. Why was he that way?
Many times it seemed as though his genetic heritage was almost a blueprint for his entire life, since his family was one of highly successful, unmarried males…with migraine headaches!
That night I called Dr. Hansen and told him about my first brush with my Hematology professor. He corroborated my impression of him, shared my frustration over his abrasive character and relished in the prospect of him soon becoming, as he put it, a ‘toothless tiger’ on account of the fact that he would have to retire soon obligatorily.
He further revealed to me a rather juicy piece of information, specifically that that Professor was having a relationship with one of his former residents, whom he had propelled to a rather enviable position at one of the foremost hospitals in the world and one of Aardvark’s teaching hospitals, ‘Massive Genital’.
As I furthered my medical studies and came in contact with more and more people in the medical field and academia, I noticed this pattern repeating again and again: elder clinicians and academicians forming relationships with younger subordinates, who subsequently saw their career prospects widen and stretch...
Trigeminal Neuralgia
Clinical: brief stabbing facial pain in trigeminal nerve area
Tx: Carbamazepine, alt. Gabapentine, Phenytoin
Cluster Headache
Clinical: occurs in clusters → 1-3 times / day for 4-8 wks, recurrent, peaks in intensity in 5 min, usually lasts 45-90 min
‘Suicide headache’, excruciating (wakes pts up in middle of night), unilateral, periorbital pain and erythema, ipsilateral lacrimation, nasal congestion, rhinorrhea
Mostly men
D/D: acute angle closure glaucoma (halos around light, fixed dilated pupils)
Tx: 100% O2 (acute attacks), Lithium, Valproic acid, Prednisone, Verapamil, Methysergide, Ergotamine (prophylaxis)
Lips are turning blue
A kiss that can't renew
I only dream of you
My beautiful
Tiptoe to your room
A starlight in the gloom
I only dream of you
And you never knew
Sing for absolution
I will be singing
And falling from your grace
There's nowhere left to hide
And no one to confide
The truth burns deep inside
And will never die
Lips are turning blue
A kiss that can't renew
I only dream of you
My beautiful
Sing for absolution
I will be singing
And falling from your grace
Sing for absolution
I will be singing
And falling from your grace
Our wrongs remain unrectified
And our souls won't be exhumed
[‘Sing for Absolution’ by Muse]
-
Now I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music, do you?
It goes like this
The fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah
(Leonard Cohen, ‘Hallelujah’)
[FREDER]
One crisp autumn morning the Aardvark community awoke to the news that one of its own boys had jumped off his dorm room balcony, apparently committing suicide.
He had been suffering from cluster headaches (the so-called ‘suicide headache’ - that made sense, since cluster headache usually afflicts males), ‘which compounded his rigid academic schedule and apparently led to his tragic act’, mentioned the official Umbridge Police report.
Thankfully this happened at one of the peripheral Aardvark dorms on Massive Ave, not the ones inside Aardvark Yard.
The story was all over the local news. Upon questioning, the guy’s dormmate, who was also the last person to see him alive just moments before he plunged to his demise, mentioned that, after shooting some steroids and working out for a while, the student stepped out to get some oxygen and after a few moments started screaming that there was a wild boar on the balcony chasing him.
His suite mate wasn't sure if he was joking, calling him a wild bore or making a joke about Neils Bohr or what, but he scolded him and told him to hush.
‘He then said he thought he could see the singer Vera Lynn on the balcony opposite theirs getting ready to jump, he started yelling something about saving her and a few moments later he was laying outstretched on the cold concrete below’ concluded the suite mate.
So our mood was low that day. But it’s hard to stay sad when you’re young, a freshman at Aardvark and about to enter one of its hallowed research labs for the first time.
Excitement quickly replaced sadness, but still I was not as excited as a fellow student who brought his camera with him to record the moment with a selfie of himself holding a test tube!
My attention was soon absorbed by a stud doing something at the far end of a lab bench. He seemed to be in his mid-to-late twenties (he later told me he was twenty seven), tall, with wide shoulders and bulky traps, dressed in a disgusting mixed-fabric piece of rag sweater with horizontal stripes of forgettable color, probably from the Gap or some other place of that ilk. But, oh, how he filled it…
I was thrilled when my advisor told me that that was the lab I’d be rotating in, but I did my best to hide my girly delight! As my advisor introduced me to the stud, I was struck by the dreamy look in his eyes, which made him seem as though he suffered from Alice in Wonderland syndrome. He definitely had a dark but beautiful energy about him, the same way a black pearl or Calla’s (see Book I – Gay Medical Mnemonic Fiction - Psychiatry) dark tones were beautiful.
I find out that Freder (that was his name) was a lowly lab tech but with higher aspirations for a medical career. In fact, he was interviewing for medical schools that Fall.
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Gay Medical Mnemonic Fiction - Neurology
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