Knowledge is power

I recently discovered the greatest thing I learned in my first year of medical school (besides how to be nice to a patient and how not to get sued by them, of course). It is something called the best way to tickle somebody's foot, ever!

It requires more than just some flimsy flexion and extension of the fingers on some area of the vast surface area of the sole... it needs to be a precise and deliberate L-shape indentation of the lateral and anterior borders of the foot:

I know this is the best way to tickle somebody's foot ever! because I have had two subjects in my study. One was my little sister Rose who is Rip van Winkle reincarnated in a little Asian girl because she will sleep in until 3 PM everyday unless awakened by me via the worst tickle attack to ever hit the Tuong household. My second subject has been poor Mike who I tickled during every commercial break of the movie Finding Forrester (which was on TV last night and was quite good and all-intellectual-stylez, I might add).

For some reason this little trick is actually clinically useful and may be found in neurology or physical examination textbooks under the term plantar response. Not surprisingly, physicians like to complete this neurological test with the sharpest thing they can find so that they may elicit the most dramatic response from their beloved patients. I recommend that you try this trick on some unsuspecting family member or significant other... but if their toes fan outwards and not inwards then you might have discovered something you might not want to know... i.e. everything upstairs isn't quite in good working order.

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In defence of my recent posts that have been overly medico-centric, I've had one instance this summer where I've actually fully relaxed and not had any silly thoughts about career decision-making or other nerdy medical stuff in my head. This happened when Mike and I decided to embark on our first picnic together in Kingston. Instead of devouring our spread of home-made salsa and President's Choice™ chicken liver paté on a french baguette in Pervert Park, we decided to venture all the way past Kingston's Norman Rogers Airport (with daily flights to Toronto, yeah!) and snack in Rotary Park which is part of the Lemoine Point conservation area. It was only a 15-minute drive away from downtown Kingston and we spent the whole afternoon by the water. Not to mention there were all these ducks milling around and I was actually brave enough to let one of these cute feathered creatures eat bread from my hand:

The afternoon was so peaceful and my head was so clear... I think I should take more of these get-aways from the city.

Who knew Kingston had so much to offer?