Ah, Heck, Little Guy

so we veeeeery rarely have pediatric patients (under age 21, actually) but today i did an appendectomy on an 11 year old. tiny little guy was all shaky with fear and pain and cold. i just wanted to scoop him up and take him away from the big mean people with knives. but then that wouldn't have fixed his problem, which was as he described, "my appendix really hurts."

all went well and he will be merrily on his way home to drive his parents crazy quite soon.

Boobs, Butts and Everything in Between

have been doing a LOT of plastics lately. i think i tallied up all the hours i spent sewing last week and it was something like 15. that's a lot of work for the same pair of hands. i don't have a back up set or anything. of course the surgeons do a whole lot more, but as they are more skilled and efficient than yours truly, they cover a lot more ground.

i enjoy plastics immensely. generally speaking you're making someone more content with their image and you're not operating on critically ill people. (the main exception to this is burn victims, which i *thankfully* don't see much of). you're also doing a lot of breast reconstruction post cancer, so it feels valuable to help give back some of the identity and dignity lost.

plus...it's fun! the outcome looks great most of the time! they went from floppy to fabulous! that's very satisfying. and the bigger the better. it's like mowing the lawn when the grass is knee-high. just look how much better it looks!

You Wanna Get High?

recent news has revealed how very weak we health professionals can be when it comes to money and drugs.

evidently if the king of pop asks you for a script for xanax you don't ask any pertinent questions like "hey, mike, you aren't already popping some 10-30 a night, are you?" and if he asks you to gank some propofol for him from the hospital, you happily comply. sad.

and if you yourself want some jollies and pills aren't enough for you, why not shoot up? a scrub tech in denver was recently discovered to be stealing syringes filled with fentanyl from the OR and injecting them in herself. so firstly, she was gaining access to something only anesthesia should be handling and was taking an extremely potent pain killer on a regular basis. and THEN she was refilling the syringes with saline and putting them back, so the patients, while paralyzed by other anesthesia drugs so they couldn't speak up, were getting no pain relief during surgery. and THEN, she knew all along that she had hepatitis C, but still gave back her dirty needle to be used on thousands of patients...and now 9 patients have been found to have hep C!! just atrocious.

when you sign on to practice health care you have all kinds of written and verbal ethics agreements and licensing boards you answer to, and always the threat of litigation. but that's not enough. deep down, you need to have some compassion for humans to get into it in the first place or you can be a major weapon. it's very scary. patients are so vulnerable to us, we cannot be this weak. we owe them more.

sigh.

What Do You Get When You Cross...

a cheetah + a moose + sher khan from "the jungle book" + a horse + the 2009 international yodeling champion???

our new dog.

he's huge (94lbs) and loud. he definitely makes his presence known. i think some of it is just that he's adjusting to the new digs, the new schedule, new food, new roommates. we also get the impression that he was rather spoiled in his previous home (fat! so fat!). so with a little time and training, i think he'll quiet down. but he will not get much smaller, though. that's for sure. he's just a tank of a dog. he has to make a 3 point turn like a semi truck in our narrow hallways to change direction. we could easily saddle him and give pony rides to the neighborhood children.

good times. :)

Looooong Short Week

my week started rough. i was on call monday night and was there scrubbed from 11 until 3 in the bloody morning, and so stayed over at the hospital in the call room so i could start my 7am regular shift "fresh." then, that day my case started at 8am and i was scrubbed all the way until 3pm doing an extensive plastics case wherein i sewed for a straight 2.5 hrs. aaaaahhhh!!! remember the game tetris and how if you played for enough hours in a row when you went to bed that night you'd still see little rows of squares lining up? that's how i was after that day. i could totally see the plane of dermis i was suturing to...back and forth, back and forth. into eternity in my sleep.

the rest of the week was better, but i'm still catching up on sleep. running a lot. did 5mls monday afternoon and another 6mls this morning. it's been easier since the weather seems more like october than july. we're officially off today but i'm on call during the day this holiday weekend. will be just kind of lying low. we are fostering a second dog from the rescue organization from which we adopted our first dog...so that adventure starts this afternoon.

happy drinking cheap beer and scaring each other with firecrackers to celebrate our nation's birthday! more soon.....