colonoscopy face

I tweeted today that someday, I want to make a video of all the faces that doctors make while they're doing colonoscopies.  Our GI colleagues are as talented as they are brilliant, but as we all do, they sometimes make some funny faces while they're working.  And since I'm almost always standing directly across from them, I get to see the full spectrum.  Here are a few favorites.

We love our GI colleagues, and I hope that I look as cute when I'm making my "concentration" face as they do.  (However, as I know I likely do not, it's a lucky thing that I'm wearing a surgical mask 75% of the time.)

This is the last comic I did for The Wellesley News, and it's the last comic I'm going to put up here for a little while, mostly because of technical difficulties.  The hand-drawn originals of all the comics are on 9 x 12 inch paper, and I guess I must have had a bigger scanner bed in college, but I simply cannot get most of these comics to scan in my current scanner without getting the edges all chopped off.  It's maddening.  I'll probably put some more up at some point (though I do think that there are only a handful left that really stand up to the test of time) but for now, here's one of the least chopped off ones, which is to say that while the left border didn't get scanned, at least no words got truncated.

I know jokes are no longer funny if you have to explain them, but just a few things: roughly one in three juniors seemed to spend their junior years abroad, ad-hoc committees were what we called our super-earnest grassroots student government coalitions formed in the interest of stamping out injustices (or, in this case, reconstituted refried bean deficiencies), and "Schneider" was what we called our student center at the time.  Oh, and "Austin Powers" was a movie that everyone thought was funny and quoted incessantly, before it became a franchise, birthed too many sequels and essentially self-destructed.  The 90's!  They were simpler times.

vintage mau's moments: the bookstore

Woah, teenaged me, way to sock it to The Man!  If by "The Man" you mean THE COLLEGE BOOKSTORE.  That'll show...someone!  Why is the character in this comic wearing a shirt and no pants? Because I was very heavily influenced by the "Jim's Journal" comic as a teenager, that's why.  (Also, "Alvin and the Chipmunks.")

I think I have said in the past that I thought at times Wellesley was a little humorless.  I think I even got asked about that in my interview with the alumni magazine.  And you know, it was a little humorless, but in the way that all colleges are kind of humorless, because everyone's just so young and earnest and full of idealism and WHY ARE YOU LAUGHING AND GOOFING OFF WHEN WE SHOULD BE KNITTING THESE HEMP SHAWLS FOR THE HOMELESS?  In that way, the first two years of medical school are kind of humorless too, before everyone realizes what a ridiculous proposition med school is, trying to take a regular person and turning them into Marcus Welby in a matter of four years.

So yes, Wellesley could be a little humorless at times.  But, you know what--I think that's OK.  If you can't be earnest and idealistic in college, when can you be?

Segue!

(This is how I make a segue.  By shouting the word "segue."  As one does.)

Speaking of bookstores, if anyone has seen my book in an actual, physical bookstore, please take a picture and email it to me!  I know sometimes certain establishments get crazy about photography in the actual store (I'm not sure exactly why), so you may have to do a pretend-to-be-texting-while-actually-taking-a-cell-phone-pic move, but I would love to see the book on physical display, and am curious to see where it's going to be shelved.  Or, if you ordered your book online, take a picture with your copy or up on your e-reader and send that to me too!  We can have a gallery of places the book has been sighted and where it has been.  Extra points for taking a picture of the book either at the bottom of the sea or in outer space.  GO!

Edited to add: Hey! Check out an excerpt from my book featured on KevinMD! Why do people become doctors anyway, and what, exactly, is a scutmonkey?

vintage mau's moments: the curse of the 5 o'clock dinner

Yeah, the water damage is pretty bad on this one, especially up at the top left.  Also see how charming it was that I was writing for the school paper so I couldn't write any curse words?  Not like now, with my blog empire, where I live like a king!  A damn hell ass king!

I remember very little about the food in the dining hall at college, only that there was this one entree, some kind of grilled chicken filet called "Chix Breast."  And I always thought that was weird, especially since we were at a women's college.

As the author of the book, I get a few free copies of course (though not unlimited free copies, as some people think--it's not like printing your own currency), but I did order a copy off of my go-to electronic retailer just to see how fast and when the book would arrive when it finally came out.  The official publication date is May 11th, so you can imagine I was a little surprised when I came home and found this at my front door yesterday.

Behold, the power of free two-day shipping!  Still, that was really quick.  Probably some of you guys who pre-ordered got your copies yesterday too, or maybe you will today.  Gleep!  We've gone live!

So a few small things:

1.) I'm told that since they're out in circulation now, copies of the book may actually start to appear in physical bookstores around the country any day now.  Atlanta is terrible with bookstores (really it seems like there are hardly any, except for a handful of scattered Borders, many of which are closing down) so I haven't had a chance to check this out for myself, but if you happen to be at a bookstore and see a copy of my book sitting there, could you please take a picture and e-mail it to me?  Get in the picture too, if you like!  Do something dorky, like give a thumbs up and point to the book.  Also, maybe do some winking!  I LOVE DORKY STUFF.  (Obviously.)

2.) Take a picture of you with the book in an interesting place and e-mail it to me.  Summer's coming up, and summer means travel.  Might you bring a copy of the book with you to read on the plane, and then pose with it at the bottom of the Eiffel Tower, or at the lip of the Grand Canyon?  You just might!  E-mail your picture to me!  (You can pose with your e-reader too, I know many many people got the e-reader version as well.)  Or take it to work, and take a picture of my book in various and amusing hospital settings.  Like, I don't know, sitting in a bedpan.  (Wait--not that.)

3.) If you read the book and liked it, why not write a review?  The book is on goodreads.com, and of course you can review it on the site of your friendly neighborhood online book retailer.  As someone who has been writing on the internet since caveman days, I realize that open and anonymous reviews of this type can sometimes be an open invitation to Random Angries to just write one star reviews which read, in their entirety, "THIS IS BULLSHIT," but it's a free country, I guess.  However, do please consider writing a review if you enjoyed the book.

4.) EVENTS!  I am getting all mixed up with the time and the dates of the events, so I'm just going to put a quick crib sheet here, so that people in those cities can get their schedules straight and come hang out.  If there's enough interest, I will plan after-events (the after-event at Iowa City was surprisingly well-attended and delightful besides) and then we can hang out some more.  Full details of the events are listed here and here, but here's the quick and dirty guide.

Wednesday, May 11th, 6:00pm: NYC (Note the time!  I think I've been saying that it's at 7:00pm, but really the event is starting at 6:00pm. So we have time to eat dinner after!)

Friday, May 13th, 6:00pm: Philly 

Monday, May 16th, 7:00pm: Boston (well, Cambridge, really) 

Thurdsay, May 19th, 7:00pm: Atlanta

I really hope you guys in the area can make it.  It's been many, many years of keeping this blog, and it would be lovely to finally put some faces to the names in the comments section, or to see old friends.

Happy reading!

vintage mau's moments: some scary things about parent-family weekend

The main good think about Parent-Family Weekend was that the food was better, and miraculously, the weather was always pretty good.  That's...that's about it.  There were also a lot of weird men-folk wandering around campus (fathers, grandfathers, brothers) and in the dorms, which was kind of jarring.  I don't know what it was like for everyone else, but for me, after about a week at Wellesley, I kind of forgot I was at a women's college.  That is, until something co-ed happened, and I had to figure out why it was so weird to see someone who was 6 foot 2 with a beard walking around.  The elusive Sasquatch!

vintage mau's moments: expecting important mail?

OK, this one got a little chopped off at edges, but look, my scanner is not very good.  I drew this comic early February of my senior year of college, basically while I was camped out by the mailboxes waiting to hear from Columbia if I had been accepted to their med school.  The day after, I got my acceptance letter.  Did my comic will it to happen?  If you print out this comic and paste it on your fridge, will good things happen to you?  Who can say?  (The answer is yes.)

This comic was not printed in "Chairman Mau's Little Red Book," (I drew it after the book was printed) so unless you are the kind of hoarder that saves old issues of The Wellesley News, you probably haven't read it before, or at least you might not remember you did. It was twelve years ago! 1999! All I really remember from that year was "Living la Vida Loca" playing in some endless loop over unseen speakers. Also, remember in the late 90's, when people straight out of college were, like, getting jobs at Merrill Lynch and stuff?  Also, see how I didn't know how to spell "Merrill Lynch"?  Now you know, all you people in the comments section who point out things that I spell wrong: College Me couldn't spell either!

Special note for international readers:

I have gotten several e-mails from a number of readers around the world who were wondering why certain international book retailer sites were listing that my book would not be available for shipping until August, when obviously, the book is coming out the second week of May.  I had my editor look into this  and she did confirm that, indeed, due to the vagaries of international book distribution, certain international retailers would not be making the book publicly available until August, three whole months after the publication date.

Not only is this a bummer (the book would be great summer reading, seems like a shame to have to wait until the end of the summer to actually get your hands on it), but it also makes international orders from these retailers ineligible for the groovy bookmark giveaway.  I WANT TO GIVE YOU THESE BOOKMARKS GUYS, but it's a very specific giveaway and the qualification does have to be a pre-ordered book to ship before or on May 11th.

I know there's no ideal solution, and everyone's best solution may be different, but I will just tell you what I know: if you want to get your book as soon as possible, please order from your choice of retailer from the list on the sidebar to the right or on this page here, be it Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Indiebound, Powell's, or whatever.  As an added plus, I've been told that several of these online retailers will be shipping out the book up to a week early, if you pre-order now.  Which means you could be reading the book by the end of next week--certainly well before August.  This is what I know, and this is what I was able to find out, so hopefully this is helpful to some of the people who e-mailed me asking what the best way was for them to get their hands on a copy posthaste.

Thanks again for all your support guys, it means a lot.  I hope you love the book, and get to read it soon!

vintage mau's moments: the things I've done for laundry quarters

I'm not going to scan all the old comics, by the way, just because, like the uncollected works of Salinger, some lost works should stay lost.  (Translation: they are lame.)  But some of them hold up OK.

Here's one from the winter of my junior year.  People probably don't even use quarters for laundry in college anymore, do they?  They probably have swipe cards or just get their holographic robot butler to do the laundry for them.  It's the year 2011.  WE WERE SUPPOSED TO HAVE ROBOT BUTLERS BY NOW.

(Again, apologies for the water damage along the edges.  You can click on the image for a larger version.)

vintage

So I'm working on answering these questions for my interview with Wellesley Magazine (look for it in the next issue, I guess? I don't actually know when it's going to run) when I suddenly remembered this comic strip I drew, back in March of 1998.

I apologize for the state of the image, but I just scanned it from the original, and the original, sadly, was water damaged many years ago from some flooding that we had in our apartment.  It's still basically legible though, and reading through this, and other comics from my tenure as the cartoonist at The Wellesley News (a position I held for three years, mainly because no one else wanted to do it), I was surprised to see that many of them held up pretty well.  I mean, some of them are very Wellesley-specific--some of the references I don't even get anymore, and I wrote them--but many, many of them could be comics about college life in general.

So!  Here's what we're going to do.  I'm going to scan some of the old comics.  And I will post them up here sequentially.  And you can read them.  You'll have to remember though, that I drew these a long time ago.  In March of 1998, when I drew this particular comic about pre-meds, I was nineteen years old.  Some of the comics are also a victim of their times, as my unfortunate and un-ironic use of the word "peeps" probably shows.  But they can be taken for what they are, which is vintage snapshots of me, doing what I still do today, in embryonic form.

I was much more prolific with my cartooning then--I had to do one new comic a week every week for the school year, and some of them were, admittedly, a little rushed.  But I never skipped a week, I never ran a repeat, and I never missed a deadline, even when I had pneumonia and the shingles back-to-back the winter of of my senior year.  That's an ISTJ for you.  (Sorry for referencing that personality test thing again, but really, if you ever wanted to know anything about me, read that link, it has me nailed down to a tee.)  By the way, in addition to this weekly comic strip, and I also had a weekly humor column in The Wellesley News--a form and style of writing which eventually begat this very blog, and then the book.  So thank you Wellesley, for getting me started.

Anyway, look here in the upcoming days for more comics from my old college strip, and try not laugh at me too much.  Or, laugh, but because you think the comics are funny, not because, I don't know, the idea of college me sitting alone in her room drawing comic strip after comic strip is just too dorky to tolerate.  Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly!  And if you're still in Boston or thereabouts, maybe I'll see you May 16th, during my reading at The Coop.  Afterwards, we can wear our pajamas to the dining hall, make nachos in the microwave, and then talk about feelings.

the 12 medical specialty stereotypes (2011)

OK everyone, here you go, revised for 2011 for our friends in internal medicine. Thanks for all that you do. And if you like the revised edition with the new panel, please feel free to link or e-mail or share via your social networking platform of choice. Computers!

(As usual, click for bigness.)

Usually when I draw comics I have a very specific set of tools that I like to use (heavy drawing paper--but not watercolor paper, that's too rough--a Pilot razor point ink pen with a fibrous tip, Sharpies of various calibers) but we've moved so many times I have no idea where my drawing pad is. So this new panel was drawn on the back of a piece of heavyweight ivory cardstock, scanned, and then pasted into the original comic via Photoshop. Hopefully it doesn't look too out of place.

Also, while you're sort of paying attention, I feel obliged to point out that the price of my book on Amazon is now almost half the list price. How does book pricing work? Who knows? Also, who cares? All I know is that you save money. Also, if the price drops lower prior to the actual release date (that would be May 11, 2011 folks) Amazon will charge you the lower price. A 336-page hardcover book for a dozen bucks and change? What's not to like? (P.S. I don't work for Amazon or anything, but I do know that as much as I am largely ignorant about the world of book publishing, the sales rank on Amazon is an important and visible metric, even in the pre-order stage. And like our friends in Internal Medicine, I would like to have good numbers, if for no other reason than to avoid embarrassment. Like Geoge McFly, I don't think I could handle that kind of rejection!)

Oh, I've also been getting asked this a lot, so let me just say it again: the book will also be available in all e-reader formats as well, so never fear, my fine robot friends. But can you wrap up an e-book and give it as a graduation gift to the pre-med in your life? Well, maybe I guess, if you were giving them the e-reader device as part of their gift too, but that's kind of expensive. More than twelve bucks, anyway. Regardless, you are a very generous person. Not to mention attractive!

As always guys...thanks.

this one's for the internists

First off, let me just say that from the first moment I put it online, I knew the 11th panel in my "The 12 Medical Specialty Stereotypes" was kind of a cop-out.  To be honest, I just couldn't think of a 12th stereotype at the time.  (I know, Anesthesiology was the actual 12th panel that I drew, but for obvious reasons I'd drawn that panel in my head long before I'd come up with any other the other ones.)  So in the moment of trying to just  trying to finish the thing, I stuck in "Radiation Oncology" because it seems to be one of those medical specialties that no one seems to understand and whose practitioners it seems we never see.  But I always regretted not thinking a little harder or a little bit longer before bringing that comic into the light, because that panel always felt like a squandered opportunity.

Well, three and a half years after the original, let's take that opportunity back.  Here's the new 11th panel of that comic strip: INTERNAL MEDICINE.

I will post a full new version of the comic with the updated panel tomorrow, and also update on the comic page of this website.  As for the radiation oncologists being bumped out of the Big 12...I'm sorry.  Please start doing amusing stuff and maybe I'll make an all new comic just for you.

from the vault

So I was digging around in my archives looking for old pictures (about which more later) when I found this mini-comic from the archives--October 2004, to be precise. I was on a PICU (Pediatric Intensive Care Unit) rotation at the time and I had a Sub-I (basically, a fourth year medical student doing an elective rotation) on the unit with me who was very, very annoying. Also he thought he knew more than me and was constantly and subversively trying to one-up me, which is a sure way for a medical student ingratiate himself to his supervising resident, a person who happens to be GRADING HIS PERFORMANCE. (Med students, take note!) Click the image to see bigger.




And also, this crude schematic of the sleeping situation in the resident call room, elucidating why you should always, always try to get the bottom bunk.




Thanks, way back machine! You have both amused and depressed me!

Speaking of pictures from the vault, I am starting to pull up old pictures for my book website to sort of flesh out and give a little extra color to some of the stories I tell in the book. This is a big project, as I have more than ten years of archives, but at least I got something started. Check back again soon, though, because this is a larger undertaking than I had originally alloted time for (see: the length of Mack's nap, plus or minus one episode of "Dino Dan"), and I'm just going to have to chip away at for a while.

the life of an attending (as imagined by residents), complete comic




(Click on comic to embiggen)

the life of an attending (as imagined by residents), part 6

the life of an attending (as imagined by residents), part 5

the life of an attending (as imagined by residents), part 4




(The above was inspired by Dr. Glenda Garvey, who I still want to be when I grow up.)

the life of an attending (as imagined by residents), part 3

the life of an attending (as imagined by residents), part 2

the life of an attending (as imagined by residents), part 1

scut i have done, medical school edition (complete comic)




(Click on comic to embiggen)

You know, in retrospect, all of these little incidents occurred in two of the ten rotations I went through my third year of med school. Panels 1, 4 and 6: General Surgery. Panels 2, 3 and 5: OB-Gyn. So take from that what you will.

scut i have done, medical school edition, part 6




(Have your own stories of scut? Share them with us in the comments section!)