April 25-26, Las Vegas, NV

Recently returned from a CME course, Body MRI Summit, organized by fellow SAR member Koenraad Mortele (Beth Israel Deaconess) and offered by IAME. Other speakers included SAR members Paul Nikolaidis (Northwestern), Bashir Taouli (Mt. Sinai), and Antonio Westphalen (UCSF). These guys are all great speakers with an amazing knowledge base (in case anyone is looking for great speakers with an amazing knowledge base). Koenraad was a former SGR Visiting Professor, so I was able to get some sage advice between talks, strip clubs, and gambling. OK, so we didn’t really visit any strip clubs, didn’t gamble, and went to bed before midnight every night, but we still had fun discussing MRI protocols and geopolitics. Now that I think about it, I’m not sure which sounds worse.

I tried to recruit one of the other speakers, Ivan Pedrosa (UT Southwestern, on the far left of both pictures), to join the SAR (my goal is one new member per trip). He would be a great asset to the society-- brilliant mind, great speaker, and nice guy (like all SAR members). If any of the two people likely to read this blog know Ivan, please talk to him about joining!

On the way back to Winston-Salem, I took the red eye and was thrilled to have received an upgrade. I dozed off after about an hour, only to have been awakened by the sound most radiologists fear more than the call pager - “Is there a doctor on board?” If you have ever been in this situation, you know the stages: denial (I’m not really a doctor, I’m a radiologist), anger (this is all Obama’s fault!), bargaining (if you just let me sleep, I’ll donate my honorarium to Doctors without Upgrades), depression (I feel like I’m on call with no resident), and acceptance (yeah, I know most of you stopped at denial, but it could happen). As I climbed over the guy next to me (who was engaged in self-pity for having sat next to one of the doctors on board), the flight attendant directed me to the back of the plane. Now, had this been a code in a radiology department, I would have sent my resident (if I could find one that wasn’t studying for the boards). Instead, I hurried to the back of the plane, wondering how many psychiatrists, radiologists, pathologists, and dermatologists I was passing on my way. I also noted that I was able to traverse the entire length of the plane in light turbulence without bumping into a single person, leading me to conclude that flight attendants must have been bumping into me for sport all these years. Fortunately, I was not the only provider to respond to the call and everything turned out fine in the end, despite my confusing the sphygmomanometer tubing for an enema tip.

On a side note, when I am in the southwest, I try to take a couple of extra days to pursue my other passion- astronomy (FYI, another amateur astronomer in the SAR—Mark Lockhart, UAB). In this case, I took a side trip to Death Valley, where I spent some quality time with the coyotes while photographing the night sky. For anyone planning a trip to Vegas, it is worth an extra day or two.

Death Valley at night

Death Valley during the day

 I was fortunate to have seen a kangaroo rat on this trip (one advantage of being the only human being for miles around in the middle of the desert at 1 am). As many of you might know, the kangaroo rat is known for its remarkably long loops of Henle that allow it to have the most concentrated urine of any mammal (other than a radiologist on a busy call weekend). Much of our knowledge about renal physiology is courtesy of this cute little rodent. For more information on kangaroo rats, try http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangaroo_rat. You might want to skip the part about their mating habits…it’s pretty graphic.