Adam Lamble

I finally made it out to my first Royals game of the year last Friday. Seeing as how I had a testing week conflicting with their first two home stands and had to painfully turn down Opening Day tickets, it was about time I made it out to the new stadium and I couldn’t have been more excited. I was going with a bunch of friends, Zach Greinke was pitching, and it was Buck Night and Fireworks Friday. The excitement quickly faded after missing the first three innings of the game thanks to ninety minutes of traffic. I should have expected what came next.

After summiting to our seats (row WW) a couple of us decide to brave the ridiculously long lines for some Buck Night grub. Long story short, turns out they had some sort of hot dog shortage because, I guess after years of poor attendance the stadium has been desensitized to sellout crowds. By the time we got to the front of the line, I kid you not, it was the ninth inning. They allotted us only six hot dogs (for eight people) and I wasn’t even able to make it back to my seat for the final pitch. The best part is, we sat down to enjoy our hot dogs while the fireworks went off, but the dogs were still frozen in the center… and the fireworks were canceled. The evening was so miserable and organized so poorly by the Royals organization that it was laughable. Jokes on them though. I asked my girlfriend to write a strongly worded letter to their front office. They don’t even know what’s comin’.

After lecture the other day I caught up with a professor to get some clarity on a question I had over the treatment of Diabetes. This professor is our pharmacology module director and is kind of a big deal on campus. A lot of faculty refer to him as a walking pharmacological encyclopedia due to his wealth of knowledge on the topic. I had a quick question over one insulin preparation but he took the opportunity to tell me everything there was to possibly know about exogenous insulin treatment. Like I said, the man is a genius. This is basically how the conversation went in my head.

Dr. P: Insulin preparations can be grouped into four categories based on duration. The first category is the one with Ultra Rapid preparations. They are wah waa wah waaa (a lot of times, to me, my professors sound like the teacher from The Peanuts cartoon). The second category is short acting insulins. Waah waa wah wha. The third category has only one drug, abbreviated NPH, and it has an intermediate duration of action. As you know, this is because it contains components derived from whale sperm. The fourth category waah waa wah wha.

Me: Wait… what?

He backed up a thought or two and tried re-explaining himself but he obviously didn’t realize which part of our conversation caught me off guard. He continued talking for another minute or two but I didn’t hear anything he was saying because my mind was racing and I kept raising questions to myself about this so called “whale sperm insulin”. Who came up with this idea? Why would my professor assume I knew this? Can women get pregnant from this insulin? Is this just a giant conspiracy by Big Pharma to take over the world with human whale babies?

After our conversation, I immediately Wikipedia’d NPH insulin and the article claims that the prolonging components were actually developed from the semen of river trout. Which, lets be honest, isn’t half as entertaining as my professor’s version. So I’m going to ignore Wikipedia on this one and go with his version because he seems to know what he’s talking about and it’s also totally more extreme.

This is an artistic rendering of how I did, and shall continue to, picture my teacher while he was talking to me. I thought about attempting to draw a picture myself but Google’s image search was more than sufficient. Except in my head, I imagined mine with a gray mustache, glasses, and a sweet KU sweater most likely bought in the ’60s.

A classmate and I were having a discussion about Anorexia nervosa and Bulimia nervosa. We were trying to decide whether someone could still be classified as anorexic if there was self induced/defensive vomiting involved. Like always, to settle our conversation we used a trusted reference only medical students know about. From Wikipedia:

Alright, conversation settled. Thank you Wikipedia. Oh, what’s that? You have more information for me?

Oh Wikipedia, you never cease to entertain and amaze me. Will you marry me?