Al, you're allowed to complain more, since you're completely blameless in who got elected.

Sadly I didn't vote. Anything that happens I can't complain about it until the next election.

For the first time in my life, I feel like I'm actually represented in at least one level of government.

Don is totally one of the coolest people I know, and I'm sure he'll do an awesome job.

Besides, Nickel was a Deke... I mean Dick... I mean, well both.

But fuckin ANDERSON again? GAWDANG. Solely on the principle of him being an asshole of a teacher, he shouldn't be in there.

YES!

Don Iveson WON!
I'm so excited!
and no more Nickel...
it's like Christmas, only more permanent...

well, I guess I'll have to steer clear of my Dad for a while... not only did the one man he despise win (Iveson, because "he has no business sense" whatever that means... I thought being a councillor was about political advocacy, and things like road maintenance and planning, not business... but maybe that's just me), but the one man he favoured lost.

... which, in the end, means that Edmonton is better off, but still... steer clear of my Dad!


oh, and no, Par, I sort-of arbitrarily picked ward 3, with absolutely no prior knowledge of the running candidates... simply just a number that wasn't 4 or 5. Buffalo Terminator was a good bonus though.

Didn't you say that when Mandel won last time?

I am happy Nickel lost too! : )

ps - Sorry I'm such a terrible correspondant.

Holy crap, Mike Nickel lost. It's a miracle!

I think this is the first election where I've voted for the winner(s). Ever. Scary thought.

Wait, Alison, did you want to vote in ward 3 so you vote for "Thomas J. ‘the Instigator’ Tomilson"? (Previously known to many as mayoral candidate Thomas James "Buffalo Terminator" Tomilson.)

The strange this is that, with polls still uncounted, he's already surpassed his vote total from 2004.

I was wondering why I hadn't read any of that before. Then I read this, and I remembered.

So, today in the clinic I saw my first patient with the common cold. You'd think "common" would show up in my first four weeks, but I guess not.

But that's not my story. My story involves my preceptor prescribing this patient codeine to help with the cough that was keeping her up at night all week. After the visit, I decided I didn't really know a lot about working up a cold, what warning signs you look for, what therapy you can provide outside of "bedrest + fluids", so I looked it up.

MD Consult (a website I had greatly underestimated until a couple of weeks ago) had a remarkably complete review of this kind of thing. And then one line struck me. They quoted a systematic review (a fairly high level of evidence in the medical research world) stating that studies had shown no benefit for codeine over the placebo in the treatment of cough due to cold.

I thought it was interesting, asked my preceptor about it (assuming that he knew this, and prescribed it more on a per-patient basis, or that he had had some positive experience with it.) Turns out, he had no idea about this finding, and we looked around for the literature around it and, sure enough, no benefit to using codeine as an antitussive.

Then it came back to bite me on the ass. Last patient of the day: a cold with cough lasting through the night, keeping her up for eight days. I finish the history, do a pertinent physical exam, and go meet my preceptor to present the case. And he proceeds to throw my smartass research right back at me. "What do you recommend, now that you've blown my conventional treatment out of the water?"

Bottom line, we tried the second patient out on dextromethorphan (the "DM" in things like "Robitussin DM"), which the studies said did show evidence of benefit, and we'll see what happens. And I learned to be careful when asking about studies that question my preceptor's standard treatment. (Also, he told me at the end of the day that he was going to do some reading about antitussive agents and promises to respond to my challenge in kind. Yikes.)

Fun day.

AW SHIT. I'm clearly not up to the task of working with HTML today. Check out the link to the pentagon report in the first post and see the links to my previous messages in the second post.

ARRRGGGHHH.