Dan meet Stan

Some introductions are in order.
Everyone who has not yet met the infamous "Dangerous Dan" consider this your formal introduction. Dan is my family's long lost son; born in the depths of our garage out of a need for a dummy and my dad's creativity. Dan is a wooden frame, fleshed out with 10 or so old pairs of pants and 15-20 shirts. He has a set of old weights for innards that bring his weight up to a respectable 80-ish pounds, and he is held together by an old blue workers coverall. His head is an old milk jug; the kind with the screw on lid. The lid is attached to the frame and the head is simply screwed on (to simulate the fragility of a human neck). Dan was created to let my dad's boy scout troop practice emergency transportation of a human (as an aside: if ever stuck in the woods with an injury that doesn't let you move, DON'T LET THE SCOUTS TRY TO MOVE YOU! Send them for help! Poor Dan's field trips out of the garage have not ended well... not well at all). I have always assumed that Dan was a rather unique family member, but here in med school I have discovered that this is not so. With that said, "Dan... meet Stan." Stan is the big man here on campus. While the state offers each medical student ~$100,000 in subsidized loans over the course of 4 years, they have invested half a million to get a student with Stan's credentials here. Much like our beloved Dan, Stan has the remarkable ability to withstand the gross errors of young, budding professionals. In all seriousness (okay, so I have a reputation for the frivolous, I can be serious, too), Stan is the dummy's dummy. He has a heart beat, his eyes dilate, you can feel his pulse, he has normal heart and lung sounds, he even breathes. Not only does he breath, he actually exhales the anatomically correct amounts of CO2, H2O, N2, and O2, and the amounts change depending on his medical condition and on the composition of the air that he breathes in (Crazy huh). Stan also bleeds (but only if you cut an artery, and he only bleeds salt water-no red dye). You can give Stan an IV, a myriad of drugs, program him to emulate a thousand different illnesses, weights, hormone levels; just about anything you can think of. You can even revive him with a defibrillator. Pretty amazing stuff, if I do say so myself. I just wanted to take this opportunity to thank people like Dan and Stan and all the other dummies that make our lives so much better. We lesser beings wince in pain at the sight of things like scouts pulling Dan up a 15 foot wall, blissfully unaware that his face is hanging off the edge of the stretcher, dragging along the cliff face as they heave away (and I won't even mention when they finally realized that 'something' was stuck and decided to just yank as hard as they could without checking to see what that something might be). I'm sure that my professors watch with the same amount of disbelief as their young students look at the Stan dying on the ER table and ask, "which drug are we supposed to stop him from going into shock again?" I hope you can all take a moment out of our busy day and remember howwonderful your life is, for people love you, even though you are not an _an.
-C.J.