CEPHALOSPORINS.

A few days ago, I was endlessly scrolling through my social media feed, and I saw this one post whom my friend, Evit (sorry, I meant Dr. Evit John), shared via Funny Doctors. --and because I'm such a nice person (yeah right..), let me go ahead and share it with you.

Sad physician :(

While knowing about cephalosporins is only the tip of the iceberg of "what it takes to be a doctor", you really have to admit that it is pretty funny. I just hope that there wasn't a picture of a seemingly disheveled physician along what could have been a really funny meme.

..and then it hit me-- The word cephalosporins rings a few bells here and there. I know that it's an antibiotic. I know that antibiotics kill germs. I know that the whole cephalosporin family has a lot of babies whose names start with cef. I know a little bit here and there, but when it comes to stuff of actual relevance.. Damn it. I KNOW NOTHING. And I'm a senior. There's nothing scarier than that.  Okay, to be fair to my former Pharmacology professors (lab and lec) at my former school, I've learned about cephalosporins, but I could have forgotten all about them. See, this is what you get for passively reading printed PowerPoint slides rather than actively processing information and writing everything down. Children, don't be like me.

I could go on and on about how my attention span has decreased due to the millennial push-button culture, but really, I didn't open up a book (at CEU, where I took Pharmacology, we used this book by Holroyd-- I didn't like that very much) simply because I was lazy. I had a Pharmacology booklet close, so I opened that instead.

I think I could develop great fondness for this antibiotic. It has four major generations, and if you're into the social sciences like I secretly am, you'd be classifying these four generations as The Greatest Generation, the Baby Boomers, Gen X, and the Millennials-- only in your head, of course.

#TWINSIES. I have this affinity for twinsie-ing in a sense that I'm a huge fan of matching things with my friends. In that sense, I'm kind of like a cephalosporin. It has that twinsie thing going on with penicillin.

There's a key here-- a cephalosporin would have an R2 side chain.
Now what exactly an R2 side chain means or does, I really have no idea.

Okay, to a really smart person, the two could be really different, but to me, they're kind of like twinsies.. and one twin just happens to be loved more.

Cephalosporins are active against gram positive and gram negative bacteria, but I think I'm only going to remember Corynebacterium diptheria because it almost sounds like it has my name in it-- Corinebacterium. I remember once being treated with cephalosporins when I had a throat infection, so I guess that would help me remember pneumococcus and streptococci as well. Okay, so now I'll have to think of ways to not forget that it's also effective against E.coli, Proteus, Kelebsiella and Neisseiria.. Hmm.

I also like that all the cephalosporin babies have names that start with the letter C, which, for near-obvious reasons, is my favorite letter.

C is for Cephalosporin

..but really, the cephalosporin family is a clan on its own, I'm rolling my eyes just thinking about even learning all the babies' names. Hmm, maybe I'm just not meant to be a doctor. I should probably just be an astronaut.

Oh wait. I mentioned earlier that I'm into the social sciences too. In Psychology, there's this thing called the Gestalt Theory, which states that the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts. Taking that, I made a teeny tiny flashcard with a teeny tiny table of cephalosporins.

If anyone wants this as a PDF or a JPEG, there's a Hello chatbox at the right hand side of the screen. I can upload this on Google Drive, and you can download it from there.-- you just have to tell me if you want it.:)

I love every generation of you, cephalosporin or not.:)
Corinebacterium magenta