Skip to main content

IN DEFENCE OF A LEAP YEAR: TRIBUTE TO MY FRIEND



Ok, seriously, this isn’t my call (mathematico-logics, I mean). My call is medicine. But then, my curiosity has been fueled by the peculiar date of birth of my friend. He was born on the 29th of February, 1988, and so i'd try.
Permit me to state the Naegele’s rule which is the standard way of calculating the due date for a pregnancy. The rule estimates the expected date of delivery(EDD) from the first day of the last menstrual period by adding one year, subtracting three months (or adding nine months), and adding seven days to the first day of a woman’s last menstrual period(LMP).
Example:
I am presenting a 26 year old Turkish woman, who is a banker whose last menstrual period (LMP) begun on the 16th March, 2013(16/03/2013). What is her expected delivery date (EDD)?
LMP=16/03/2013
         +1 year= 16/03/2014
          -3 months/+9 months= 16/12/2014
           +7 days= 23/12/2014
Therefore, the EDD is 23rd of December, 2014
I would like to reverse the process a bit so as to arrive at the LMP, since the EDD is given (assuming EDD was 40 weeks/280 days from LMP)
EDD= 29/02/1988
LMP=?
-1 year= 29/02/1987
+3 months= 29/05/1987
-7 days= 22/05/1987
LMP= 22/05/1987
Anyways, now that the LMP has been ascertained (provided the date of delivery wasn’t beyond/before the EDD), we ought to discuss the leap year, oughtn’t we? Why is there a leap year?
A leap year is a year in which a leap day is added to the calendar, so as to synchronize it with the seasons.
Why do we need leap years? Leap years are needed to keep our calendar in alignment with the Earth’s revolutions around the sun. This is because the earth takes about 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds to circle once around the sun. if the 29th day wasn’t added to February on the Gregorian calendar (the standard calendar for civil use), after a century, our calendar would be off by about 24 days. Does that look small? Ok, how about this: we would have lost about 6 hours off our calendar every year!
The implications are that without a leap year, we would all have unstable birthdays and there would be asynchrony of the calendar.
A leap year is evenly divisible by 4, 100, and 400. It was introduced by Julius Caesar in 46 B.C. but has since been modified.
Really, without the leap year, life on earth wouldn’t be as organized as it is now.
To the friend who made this blog post possible #Oladele Femi#…and who indeed made blogging a reality for me.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!!
Your EDD, if right, states that you weren’t conceived in a leap year, but and that without your date, the earth would be asynchronized. You are indeed special.






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

WANNABE INTERN

Week 2 Message to the Pre-Intern: don’t lose hope! Week 2, for me, was 2 months post-induction. This was when the wait began to sink in. You mean I’ve been home for two whole months? By now, I was literally chewing on my fingernails. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t scared of getting a space, but I certainly wasn’t confident about any place anymore. That is when I began to write this book. Today is the 12th of September and I sit at the dining table in my parents’ house, typing at 11:27pm (because well, I have an editing job to finish up, but mostly because I don’t have to go anywhere tomorrow morning). If I don’t want to, I don’t even have to take a bath tomorrow morning because well, I can stay indoors all day! (I most likely will stay indoors, except for those few minutes when I step out to buy hot akara for my akamu). I am spent. You know, I have applied to a couple of places now. Let me start with the first: LS Health Service Commission At the State Health servic
1 comment
Read more

CLINICALLY: CLERKING AND CLECKING

A typical medical practitioner knows all about this process of clerking, this is basically the first thing he does when attending to a patient i.e. he clerks. Clinically, clerking involves: 1.       History Taking- involves taking demographic data, noting the main presenting problems, past medical history, history of main presenting complaint, family history, occupational history, drug history, alcohol history e.t.c. Basically, it helps in determination of symptoms. 2.       Physical Examination- is useful in the elicitation of signs of the disease in question. 3.       Provisional and differential diagnosis: the clinical history and physical examination conducted will help the clinician arrive at provisional diagnosis, from which he arrives at a differential diagnosis. 4.       Management Plan- involves investigative procedures (e.g. haematological investigations) as well as a treatment plan for the diagnosed disease. How about clecking? Clecking is not a word that’s us
Post a Comment
Read more
ALL THESE ENDLESS STUDYING !… On exams and fear All these comparing and measuring ourselves by ourselves! Its so wrong and self-limiting. All these numerous, bulky, endless exams in medical school can get even the strongest of us  jittery! However, the most successful person isn’t the one whose prime goal is a 100% on the scoresheet but those with the excellent mentality that to be a good doctor, you have to have the requisite knowledge. Just to remind us of our prime focus,  which is true excellence that comes, not from passing an exam from excelling superbly at what you do:  “Medicine is more than the application of scientific facts to treat people. If your highest goal is to simply pass the exams, you may still succeed but the journey will be fraught with much anguish. However, if you remember that someday, you can relieve the suffering of one individual or save just a person’s life from what you’d learn each day as you study, all your efforts will take a new meaning and purp
2 comments
Read more