Speckies! 12/28/94 PAUL13

I guess since I got this letter post-marked before January 1st, it still gets to be put in the Specie Annual. It also helps to be best friends with the chief editor!

I just wanted to say that this year has really been the best for the club. Many of you joined in 1994 and a majority of all the club's letters have been written in the past year. You will find them all in the 1994 Speckie Annual! Mike and I have worked hard to get it together. I hope you enjoy it. It is our (late) Christmas gift to you. Of course, we would have wanted you to have it even if it wasn't Christmas time. Funny how the celebration of the year's end is so close to Christmas; it was meant to be a time for gift giving. Anyhow, 'thanks' to those of you who have contributed to the club this year. It has truly made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Bad news now. Unfortunately, I will not be making my goal of reading 52 books in 1994. I think I got to 44; so close, but not quite there. I was doing well before I went back to school in the Fall -- funny how that is. I wonder how many other things I have sacrificed for the sake of school. I have also been in the process of moving at the end of December and I thought it would be better to get my life in order instead of spending the last few days of the year reading constantly to make my goal. O.K., enough excuses. I'll just have to reinstate my goal for 1995. "In 1995, I will read 52 books."

O.K. Now for the exciting piece of literature that I do have to share with you. By now, you all should know who Michael Crichton is. Well, I keep finding books written by him that I've never heard of. I just finished with one of his first novels called Five Patients, published in 1970. This novel is what the new TV series ER is based on. Crichton himself was a medical student around that time. This book is about five random people that were helped by the Emergency Ward (EW) at Massachusetts General Hospital while Crichton was doing his intern there.

As a whole, it isn't as good as some of his other things, but it interested me because it deals with many of the medical and public health issues that I've been studying this past semester. There is even a glossary of medical terms in the back of the book which helped me to better understand some terms we hear all the time, like angiogram is an X-ray study of blood vessels, cirrhosis refers to the destruction of parts of an organ replaced by fibrous scar tissue, usually refers to the liver following damage from alcohol or other causes, and idiopathic meaning of unknown origin, which doctors use when the obvious diagnoses have been ruled out but it is still uncertain what the cause of a symptom is.

The book is broken up into five parts. Each part describes in detail how a patient has been helped by the EW. The first patient you read about immediately dies upon arriving at the EW, but the way the family is informed is what Crichton discusses. He points out the good and the bad about American Health Care and where it needs to go for the U.S. to catch up with the rest of the world. It really is too bad that by now we still haven't adopted a national health plan. As a country, we pay more for health care than any other nation, yet get less service per person than any of the other nations with a national health plan. That's sad, because it reflects the shortsightedness of the taxpayers and the greediness of the bureaucrats. That's my two cents.

I'll try to have more to talk about next time!

Paul!