WAHH!!! I'M GOING TO GO INSANE!!

COKELESS FOR:
481 hours and 43 minutes

Still fucken bored... tomorrow last day of school so please all Normos who read this, don't go... for the sake of me, Mark and the black peoples entertainment...

Explosions in mah headfones:
I Want You Bad - The Offspring
la di da di da... pretty catchy song

deaded at 9:43 pm







No coke for almost 2 weeks... I keep replacing other words with "coke"!!
Example:
Hey Coke [Charith], gimme some of your Coke [chicken tender roll.. yum ;)]

My brain is going to explode soon...

Moving on... Em has gone to viet and i have nothing to do for the hols coming up next week... probably go out with everyone else and get wasted at Macquarie

Aipodo desu: Drain The Blood - The Distillers
lol love Brody Dalle's voice

deaded at 9:13 pm







Ahh shit Em's PARENTS found out bout me and they actually know my name now... pretty fucked up.

Coke famine going well. Been 145 hours and 3 minutes since my last coke. So very thirsty...

Gonna go see Stormbreaker next Thurs. Hope it's good.

Sex to mah ears;
I'm Not Okay (I Promise) - My Chemical Romance
fucken addicted to that song now after I saw the vid

deaded at 9:03 pm





A Long Rant on HIV

On HIV:

This week is immunology week in our course. (Immunology is the study of how the body’s innate defences against infection and injury can go wrong.) This includes HIV, which is an infection of immune cells rendering them impotent and allowing other infections, which normally have no foothold in the body, to take over; it is usually eventually fatal. One of the figures which particularly struck me was the worldwide prevalence of HIV: 1 in every 150 people worldwide have HIV. This is amazing. That’s a lot of people who have it.

How often do people think about HIV, and how they might reduce its incidence, or the suffering of the people who have it? For a disease which is so insidiously prevalent worldwide, why is it that there is almost no focus on it in the media? A few people die of SARS, over a few months, and it’s an epidemic. Many more people die from AIDS-related disease every year and there’s little to no mention of it. Perhaps one of the reasons is because a majority of infected people live in Africa, and who cares about such an overpopulated, underdeveloped, poor, politically unimportant, war-torn, dirty, primitive area anyway? An estimated 35% of people in southern Africa are infected with HIV. I bet if the numbers were that high in America or Australia we’d be hearing about it at least once a week on the news.

Another reason would probably be related to the primary methods of transmission of the HIV. Everyone knows homosexual men and intravenous drug users are the most at risk, right? (In fact, in Australia, where there are needle exchange programs and safe injecting rooms, the highest risk is in homosexual men, whereas in the US where such programs don’t exist, the intravenous drug users make up a far higher proportion of those who contract HIV, and numbers of people infected with HIV are some four times higher.) This must be a punishment from higher powers, right? Maybe God’s punishing the gays! And the druggies! Serves them right!

This viewpoint *really really* pisses me off. Firstly if you have this view of HIV then you should logically apply that view to diseases like polio, which paralyses kids. Yeah, those kids! They need some discipline! That’s what polio’s for! Or smallpox, which almost wiped out the American Indians. Well, that’s natural selection, right? The best survives? …Secondly, no one has the authority to speak for God. Who knows why God does things? We can guess and we might even get it right sometimes, but if you’re not God, don’t speak for him. People like that give God a bad name.

Of course, this doesn’t just apply to HIV; HIV was just the medium by which I started thinking about all this. What about vaccine-preventable diseases? (That was in another lecture I had this week.) The poor regions, Africa and South-East Asia, have the highest rates of vaccine-preventable infant deaths. Things like diptheria, tetanus- diseases we in Australia get vaccinated for almost automatically from birth. Cheap vaccines which can potentially prevent life-long illness, deformity and death are not given. Why? And why does no one in normal life seem to care? I’m not even saying I’m special in this respect; I know myself, and I know that in a week or two after I’ve written this, I’ll go back to not caring about any of it. Why?

This leads me onto a related topic. I often wonder whether, in training to be a doctor, I’m doing the best with my life I can. As a Christian, I believe the most important thing is to bring people to know God. An extremely basic summation of Christianity (which leaves out quite a lot of necessary detail; don’t anyone assume this is all there is to it, because that’s not what I mean to portray) is, believe in God or go to hell. Literally. So any Christian who cares in any way at all about anyone else is practically compelled to warn them about the consequences of not believing.

Where is the space in this for doctoring? For healing people’s bodies, when they’ll be going to hell anyway? What is the point, in the long run? Who cares about those infected with HIV? They can still become Christians! And then they’ll die, but it won’t matter because they won’t be in hell! A subtle variation on this argument: what’s so bad about slavery? They had slaves back in Jesus’ day, and some of them even became Christians. Paul even told them to obey their masters. So why did a few Christians in the 1800s take such offence at the whole practice of slavery and start up an anti-slavery movement?

I’m glad that someone reminded me of the two greatest commandments at this point. They are: “love God” and “love your neighbour”. If you love someone, you want what’s best for them. This includes telling them about hell, because I think most people would agree that hell is probably a long way from being the best for anyone. But it also, I think, includes quality of life. If you love someone, you will want a higher quality of life for them. And that’s the reason why slavery was abolished (in quite a lot of places, but not all; slavery still exists and anyone who denies that has their head in the sand), and that’s the reason why we should remember and try to care for HIV infected people.

And that’s why I will continue to train in doctoring. Because even though I may not be primarily involved in telling people about God and hell and what the difference is, I will still be trying to improve the quality of some people’s lives, by prolongation or by relief of pain and disease, and that’s all part of loving my neighbour.

By Esta the med student
got any problems or corrections? send an email here

deaded at 4:35 pm





On The Pointlessness of Life:

There are people who say that life is pointless, that there is no higher meaning to what we do, that each and every day we wake up to trundle through a routine that we will repeat again and again to no avail, and that the end of it all we will die and leave nothing behind or forward.

I often wonder why these people are still alive. If they really believed in this philosophy, if they truly utterly believed the truth of this to the very core of their soul, then why bother? Why continue to live out a meaningless existence which will contribute nothing lasting and mean nothing and is of no significance whatsoever? What’s the point?

Of course there are a few suicides who probably believe this. Hooray for them, who are willing to die for their beliefs. (Note though, that the vast majority of suicides are mentally ill with depression, or are attention-seeking. There are probably even some which are accidental. I do not consider those with depression to be true believers in the particular philosophy we are discussing- cerebral chemical imbalances and life circumstances influence their thought too much for any conclusions to be reached by a completely rational path.)

But most people who say that there is no point to life are still walking around, living. Why? “Oh, well, we might as well have some fun.” Why, what for? What point is pleasure if there is no point? “Propagate the species.” You could leave that to those poor idiots who think there *is* some sort of meaning to life- after all, there’s plenty of them around. Other excuses are even worse and I’m not going to bother with them.

Basically, those proponents of a pointlessness to life don’t believe in what they say. If they did, they wouldn’t be around to say it.

Hypocrites.

By Esta the med student
any problems or corrections? send her an email here




deaded at 4:24 pm







Click here
to see My Own Destruction perform No Reason by Sum 41... lol... Yutaro singing...cruel...

deaded at 11:18 am