The experience of being ill can be like waking up in a foreign country. Life, as you formerly knew it, is put on hold while you travel through this other world as unknown as it is unexpected. When I see patients in the hospital or in my office who are suddenly, surprisingly ill, what they really want to know is “What is wrong with me?” They want a road map that will help them manage their new surroundings. The ability to give this unnerving and unfamiliar place a name, to know it—on some level—restores a measure of control, independent of whether that diagnosis comes attached to a cure. Because, even today, a diagnosis is frequently all a good doctor has to offer.

- Every patient tells a story

I have so much to comment about this

Delilah and Samson,
By Max Liebermann

In revenge and in love, a woman is more barbaric than man is.

- Friedrich Nietzsche

When you see absent P-waves, you must check whether the rhythm is regular or irregular based on the QRS complex:-

- Irregular and normal QRS: most likely to be atrial fibrillation.

- Regular: if the QRS < 120 ms (narrow), then it's likely to be paroxysmal SVT.
If the QRS > 120 ms (wide) then it's probably VT.

JUST TO BE CLEAR: This is an oversimplification with a lot of buts and ifs.
For example, some paroxysmal SVTs can present with wide QRS if they're associated with pre-existing LBBB.

In AF, the P-wave is either absent or it's replaced by rapid, variable, irregular and low-amplitude oscillating fibrillatory waves.

Also, the diagnosis of VT is defined as: tachycardia (>100-120 bpm), and the rhythm originates below the bundle of His (in the ventricles, therefore it is a ventricular rhythm).

Usually, you can tell if the rhythm is sinus or ventricular by observing the P-wave & the QRS complex. If QRS is wide and P-waves are absent or dissociated from the QRS (not every P-wave is followed by QRS) then it's most likely to be ventricular rhythm.

A wide QRS happens in VT because the rhythm originates in the ventricles and this makes the depolarization of the ventricles slower and takes a longer time (indicated by wide QRS > 120 ms)

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”

- Mark Twain

Death cannot touch us because while we exist death is not present, and when death is present we no longer exist.

- Epicurus

أيا سافِرًا ورداءُ الخجل
مُقيمٌ بوَجنَتِهِ لم يَزَل

بِعَيشِكَ، رُدَّ عليكَ اللثامَ
أخافُ عليك جِراحَ المُقَل

فما حَقُّ حُسنِكَ أنْ يُجتَلى
ولا حَقُّ وجهِكَ أنْ يُبتَذَل

أمِنتُ عليكَ صروفَ الزمان
كما قد أمِنتَ عليَّ المَلَل

- أبو فراس الحمداني

An idea is not the same thing as a fact. A fact is something that is dead, in and of itself. It has no consciousness, no will to power, no motivation, no action. There are billions of dead facts. The internet is a graveyard of dead facts. But an idea that grips a person is alive. It wants to express itself, to live in the world. It is for this reason that the depth psychologists—Freud and Jung paramount among them—insisted that the human psyche was a battleground for ideas. An idea has an aim. It wants something. It posits a value structure. An idea believes that what it is aiming for is better than what it has now. It reduces the world to those things that aid or impede its realization, and it reduces everything else to irrelevance. An idea defines figure against ground. An idea is a personality, not a fact. When it manifests itself within a person, it has a strong proclivity to make of that person its avatar: to impel that person to act it out. Sometimes, that impulsion (possession is another word) can be so strong that the person will die, rather than allowing the idea to perish. This is, generally speaking, a bad decision, given that it is often the case that only the idea need die, and that the person with the idea can stop being its avatar, change his or her ways, and continue.

- Jordan Peterson

The bro code🍻

إنّ في الإنسانِ شوقًا إلى أن يكون خرافيًا، إنّ الحقيقةَ وحدها كئيبة، غبية، دميمة.

- عبد الله القصيمي

"Sunlight And Shadow" by Albert Beirstadt