Medicine In Film: Wit

Hi guys! Sorry for the week-long hiatus, I've been a little bit busy with failing my exams (yay). Ready for another cheery film about people dying in nasty ways? No? Well tough shit, cause that's what you're getting. The last film of this series is Wit, an film adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play of the same name starring Emma Thompson as a poetry professor who has been diagnosed with stage IV ovarian cancer. For those of you not in the know, ovarian cancer ain't pretty; stage IV ovarian cancer, in particular, is about as much fun as attempting to swallow live piranhas while on a broken rollercoaster, blindfolded. And the blindfold is snakes. Angry snakes.

They're angry because you're eating their piranhas.

This movie is a little unlike our previous two in that it's less based around healthcare and actually has medicine and, as we like to call it, the "patient experience" in mind as the key focus of the film. That sounds nice though, doesn't it? Patient experience. In this case, no, no it's not.

"Ok, and I'm just going to start inserting the piranhas now..."

Medicine In Film: The Sea Inside

Ahoy there, dear readers! Apologies in advance for this post seeming a little rough around the edges or too rambly, but I lost my laptop charger this week and have been out of commission for a few days so I'm a little behind on things. Now where did we leave off? Ah yes; last time we had a demented old lady being cared for by her devoted husband and today we're looking at a quadriplegic Spaniard who has been trying to die for 30 years. Well shit, this is just getting perkier and perkier in't it. Shall we?

Today's film is The Sea Inside (or Mar Adentro), starring Javier Bardem; a true story of the 3-decade-long struggle of the author Ramon Sampedro, who suffered a paralyzing neck injury in his 20s, to be given the right to take his own life by Spanish courts. Another author? I think the real moral here is not to write books unless you want to have some seriously nasty shit happen to you.

Like male-pattern balding.

Medicine in Film: Iris

Ladies and gentlemen, I bring joyous news! My exams are finally over and with two more weeks until the results come out (ack!) I've at long last had the opportunity to sit back and relax for a few days. That said, there is no rest for the wicked so I've been thrust back into university work almost straight away in the form of a month of individually allocated mini-projects. These 'Student Selected Components' (SSCs) can range from surgical placements to research opportunities to a study of the arts.

I'll give you one guess which of those I got my greasy fingers all over.