'Tis the season to be coughing, sneezing, feverish...

I was up all night last night because I couldn't breathe when I lay down, even after drinking hot water mixed with vitamin C and sake. (No need to panic and call an ambulance, I am very familiar with this unpleasant phenomenon.) I canceled all my work for the day, and will spend the day in bed (or fainting upon the sofa) in the hope of being better tomorrow.

On the positive side, I have a first draft of my Yuletide story. For some random reason, nothing to do with my request, I had an incredibly hard time writing it. Last night I seriously considered doing one of her other requests instead, but some fandoms I didn't know and others struck me as probably being ones I'd find just as hard as the one I actually had, I invoked Tim Gunn's "Make it work" and managed to produce a first draft.

Will the story actually be good? Uh... Well... At least I have today to work on it?

Please insert cheer, amusement, or shared misery into comments.

Every Patient Tells A Story; The Horse and Buggy Doctor

Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis, by Lisa Sanders, a doctor who's the consultant for House (I am sure she is not to blame for its inaccuracies, though), is a solid, readable book about... well, exactly what it says on the tin, but with the most attention paid to the physical exam, which according to Sanders is a dying art in America. I still think the best book on the subject is Atul Gawande's Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science, which reaches the heights of fine literature, but Sanders's book is informative and worth reading if you're interested in the subject.

Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis

Arthur E. Hertzler's The Horse and Buggy Doctor (Bison Book) is more of general interest, assuming that medical details don't make you turn green and then faint. He wrote it in 1938, looking back on his long career as an American doctor, and the first chapter looks even farther back, to medicine as it was practiced in his boyhood (the 1880s).

This is well worth reading for two reasons: the content is fascinating and eye-opening, even if you already have a decent background in medical history, and Hertzler's style is unique, oddball, literate, grumpy, and vivid. He has a way with deliberately stilted and roundabout phrasing that cracked me up.

To return to the female complaints. One may divide them into two general classes: the female complaints and the male complaints. The former include those due to maladjustments between the biologic and the ethical. Male complaints, on the other hand, are those in which man is the aggravating factor or, maybe, the regressive factor. These are subtle things which only doctors can hope to understand.

...

The more intimate relations between doctor and patient have never before been discussed in print, but I am going to come nearer to doing so than has yet been done. Only an old doctor who has lived with people knows this relationship…. The more nearly the doctor's experience of life has paralleled the patient's before him, the better he is able to understand that patient. The tragedies of literature are silly things; they must be made simple and obvious or else they will not be understood. Shakespeare wrote tragedies out of his imagination, not from experience. They are foolish, because he had not seen life in the raw. Tragedies cannot be written. They are inarticulate.

I wish every parent considering not vaccinating their child was obliged to read the first chapter, in which he relates how common it was for children to die of now-preventable diseases; one family had nine of ten children die of diptheria. He proceeds to explain exactly what death by diptheria looks like. I already knew this, but his description brings it to horrifying life.

Not all of the book is that intense, and much of it is quite funny. If you can bear reading about death and gross procedures, I recommend it.

This seems to be out of print, but Amazon has used copies listed at very cheap prices.

And to make this day absolutely perfect...

...I got my very first flame on a Yuletide request post! Anonymous, no less. Though, to be fair, not my first Pern-related flame.

http://edonohana.livejournal.com/28761.html?thread=217177#t217177

I am especially grumpy about this because I saw the header "Pern" before I read the content, and my heart leaped with the thought that someone had written me a pre-Yuletide Treat.

The plot thickens!

(Sorry for spamming so much. I have been in bed or languishing on the sofa all day. It will stop soon, I promise.)

My Yuletide assignment just went out as a pinch hit (and was claimed) at around the same time I got the hostile, anonymous flame on my Dear Yuletide letter. Coincidence? I think not!

Okay, maybe it was. But it does sound like someone matched on Pern, got really pissed off by my letter (which talked both about what I did and did not like about canon), and finally gave up and defaulted, leaving behind nothing but a trail of flame.

ETA: Or, less interesting possibility: someone checked out my Yuletide letter because they were on the pinch hit list, got pissed off, and flamed.

By the way, I have eaten nothing all day (no appetite) and have been again drinking hot sake and lemon. This will make me extra-focused for attempting revisions on my own story, I'm sure.

ETA II: Check out the LJ comments - they are hilarious.