Day 720

The first day of the neuro-psych clerkship was mainly orientation plus some practice we got to do on standardized patients. I actually knew a lot more than I thought I did about giving a neuro exam. Lets hope I still think that tomorrow when I start training for real.

And now as a last hurrah before year three really escalates, I present to you a demo. The first demo for the Year Two album (it’s actually the 4th track on it). This song is the least important out of all the songs on the new album so I don’t feel bad revealing it in its bare bones demo form. As a kind of exercise in aesthetics, I sometimes reduce the meaning of my songs down to a single word. Last week, I went through the Year Two songs and did this.
The one word meaning of this song is “Sacrifice”.
I don’t have time to go into a full explanation and most of you probably wouldn’t read it anyway so I thought I’d just explain the song in list form and if you want to you can look things up. I recommend listening to the song first and then going back and reading this list and the lyrics. “White Mass” is the sister song to “Silhouettes in Smoke” from the Year One album. It has the same structure and both are inspired by my experiences on my LCE rotations.

Meaning list:
The title - a double meaning - parathyroid adenoma and a special mass given by the Catholic church for physicians
1st verse - the pressures of a surgical rotation, the stomach/communion
2nd verse - pathology, speaking medical jargon to the patient’s relatives, parathyroid adenoma, scrubbing in
Refrain - Cosmas and Damian (two of many patron saints of physicians), a triple layered reference to their miracle of limb reattachment(according to legend), Mathew 5:30, and gangrene caused by Clostridium perfringens. also a comment on sacrafice

Lyrics:

“White Mass”

Caught in the cathedral
Early in the morning
Under the fluorescent glow
Praying for forgiveness
From the hired healer
For the names that I don’t know
Hands folded together
Walking toward an altar
I could maybe make my home
The bread and the wine
The holiest chyme
The King on his chloride throne

The confession of sins
Through a microscope lens
When the stain speaks as loud as your heart
Talking in tongues
To the daughters and sons
To the husbands and wives in the dark
The calcium stripped
From the bones of believers
The devil inside of your neck
A sacrament given
Before exorcism
I’m washing my hands of the death

Then Cosmas and Damian said,
“What good is a leg if you’re in the grave?
To earn our patronage
Sever yourself, amputate
Everything that makes you trip
If the autoclave’s proven ineffective.
‘Cuz ambulating with a limp
Isn’t half as bad as the infection.”