Lady Gaga had to cancel some shows because she has Synovitis. Can you get that from wearing raw meat?  Just checkin’.  Actually, I know a little something about this. Synovitis, I mean.  Not the wearing meat part; I much prefer to eat mine.

Go back to me at 18.  Yes, I know it was a long time ago.  But there are some things you do not forget, like my first days in the emergency room at the ancient and venerated Massachusetts General Hospital.  It had been open since 1811.  I read the log; the first patient was a French sailor — ships could dock at the front door, then — with what was politely referred to as a “social disease.”  It was a work-study job assigned to me as an undergraduate, allegedly pre-med, at the sprawling Boston University. They laughed when I said I was going to be a doctor. I took people’s wallets from their pockets, looking for identification and insurance cards and I was good at that nefarious profession.  I loved the moments when it was quiet up front and I could sneak back to an operating or treatment room, stealing a generally useless tidbit of medical knowledge.  Such tidbits seemed so precious then. I remember sneaking back to the cast room when a handsome, muscled, orthopedic surgeon was casting a leg.  He was laughing at me, like everyone else.  He told me to ask him questions. The lady with fake blond hair, whom he was casting, was laughing, too.  “Go ahead, honey.  Ask him questions.” I asked him, I guess she hurt her knee.  “How do you know how high up and how low down to build the cast?”  Above and below the injury.  Knees were kind of a mess, but you always worried about the articulations above and below.  The orthopedist was not particularly articulate.  I started thinking that any idiot could be one, and medical school should not be that hard to get into. I thanked him and turned to leave when he hit me with something I have never forgotten.  “Casts are easy.  Broken bones are easy.  The tough stuff is soft tissue.  Nobody knows a damned thing about soft tissue injuries.  They act like they do, but they don’t.”  I repeated my thanks, and felt bad that I had to slip back to the front desk and the business of who people were and who paid for all this.  Read more on Lady Gaga’s Synovitis…