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.....

More Tasty

one last fresh and tasty meal that the BHE made last week since we're on our healthy and delicious cooking kick. Bankok Drunken Noodles. amazing. fresh and bright and spicy- depending on how much thai chili sauce you use (he did that in place of the fresh red chilis). maybe a little time consuming, but definitely worth it. and it made enough for 4 meals!

What is The World Coming To?

well, my day was better than that of the medical staff at UCLA Medical Center where some poor schmuck was doing chest compressions thinking to himself "I CANNOT LET THE KING OF POP DIE ON MY WATCH! OH SWEET SHIT, PLEASE WAKE UP/REBOOT!"

i was observing today what a weird place the hospital is. here we are doing various serious things like taking out bowel and thyroid cancers and fixing old ladies' fractured hips (and to maybe a lesser degree- making breastsesses perky and full). but what were we all talking about? Jacko and John +4 and Kate +4.

does that make us jaded and sick? nah. it's just survival i guess.

you know what IS sick? denise richards as a nuclear physicist in "The World is Not Enough" playing on TV right now. say what?

I'm a Total Pansy/Turning Over a New (Basil) Leaf

so i didn't go to my reunion. i stayed home and hung out with my family watching our team win a baseball game instead. and i don't feel the least bit bad about it. i was hemming and hawing about whether i should bother driving the two hours to get there and then when we got on the road there was construction everywhere, so i just saw it as a sign and came back home. i also did not want to have to get dressed up and wear special underroos and nylons just to look slick in my pencil skirt. and i didn't want to have to make small talk with a bunch of people i barely knew then and certainly don't know now....like i said- total pansy. so i'll catch up w/ the few people i missed at a later date and will amuse myself with all the facebook pics that have been posted. it appears that everyone is as slim and pretty as they used to be, so that fact alone would have spoiled much of my evening's enjoyment. (evil).

and i'm taking control of my health. i decided this weekend that i am (oh geez) training for a half marathon in october. yikes. the BHE and i have also decded that we've been taking all kinds of shortcuts with our diet lately. not only are we not as balanced and low fat as we should be...but we're being poor vegetarians by eating tons of fake meat soy products (fake burgers, fake chicken, fake lunch meat, etc), eating out a lot, and making only super quick, simple meals. so now that our herbs in our herb garden are falling over they'e so huge- we're starting to cook healthy veggie food from scratch again. you should have seen the produce haul we got from the grocery store this weekend. like garden of eden.

Day #1 Vegetarian Stuffed Grape Leaves (Dolmades)- totally delicious. rather time consuming. 2 WW pts for 3 of them- recipe came from WW cook book. used lots of our fresh dill. hmmm....

Day #2 Bowtie pasta with Basil, Cilantro, Spinach, and Goat Cheese- mixed the basils i've been growing- fresh purple, spicy, and sweet basil, plus fresh cilantro (coriander). very tasty. made huge amount for lunches this week.

...and now i'm craving peanut butter ice cream. must fight impulse. eat an apricot. that'll be just as good...yea, that's it....

Hummus and Hematomas

well, the good thing this week is that i've eaten spicy hummus for my last 3 meals. i like that.

the bad thing this week has been everything else.

it's been crazy busy on the floor as usual. seeing about 18 fairly complicated patients daily including writing notes and orders, providing wound care and preparing them for discharge. often not eating lunch until i'm about to leave for the day. pulling my hair out and running around in circles.

and, in case i'm not nervous enough about messing someone up good....earlier this week i did a very minor procedure at bedside that shouldn't be at all a big ordeal, but somehow this one caused the patient much bleeding and agony. in retrospect, it was sort of a fluke and nothing i could have prevented. but that hasn't stopped me from feeling a lot of guilt and angst about it. sometimes things happen that are unfortunate but unpreventable. i know this, logically. but i took little comfort in this while watching the patient writhe over something my hands had done. ya know?

but that patient is coming through the ordeal relatively unscathed and my week is almost over. this weekend is my (gulp) 10 year high school reunion. i couldn't be more excited (terrified) to go and am really looking forward to catching up with all my old school chums (drinking too much and exposing myself to the captain of the football team). i'll keep you posted about how everything goes (are the mean girls chubby now? will anyone recognize me without my goth makeup and smirk? will there be any pig's blood? it's an open bar, right?).

cheers!