[Sethomas]

It's been mentioned that I come from a largely medical family, setting up an even more ironic backdrop for posting a youtube video of me removing my own sutures. It's interesting because my mother provides perspective as a dunce nurse who deals with pompous doctors, my father is a radiological technician who's been apportioned all kinds of random managerial tasks to give him insight into the bizarre and often infuriating workings of the American medical industry, and my sister is an actual doctor who has had training and practice in places as varied as Guyana, England, and Manhattan.

When my sister's graduation from medical school was approaching, my family sat in one of those moments that come rarely each year when we're all together. Speaking of medical ethics, my father summarized the spirit of Hippocrates by saying "in any instance, the worst thing you can do is nothing." Sometimes this means that you have to pretend to look like you're doing tests to ease the patient's mind when there's a period of time when awaiting actual relevant results. Sometimes this means you have to tell the patient that they'll die in half an hour, and so you pull out a book and read to them.

My flatmates noticed that it was cold in the condo today, so one of them changed the thermostat to the "heat" function. They forgot, however, to adjust the temperature setting to something above what would require the separate air conditioning function.

Quite admirably by the standards of my father's advice, and perhaps heroically, my furnace has been fanning air at the cold room temperature for the past several hours.