Well, well, well.

i spent the last week in the hospital. i have lots of lurid details for you and perhaps amusing/scary tales to regal you with. but give me a day to continue to heal and to collect my thoughts. here are the basics, which i wrote up for a friend earlier. i'll fill in the rest later-

i started a temp two wednesdays ago and went to the ER because it was up to 103 or something and i was worried. everything was well, they said it was a virus and they sent me home. so it persisted and i started getting a cough and stuff, but mostly just bad chills/sweats. fever went up to 105 on sunday night despite around the clock tylenol, cold baths, ice packs. so i was admitted last sunday and they had me in there until just 2 days ago, saturday. they ran every test in the book for everything from viruses to wacky bacterial infections to HIV and cancers and lupus and never found anything relevant. but my fevers lasted for days at that high temp despite all measures. and my blood counts got all wacky- pancytopenia- had to get 6 units of platelets over 2 days, etc. with all the fluid, i ended up in some CHF and had to be diuresed. eventually my counts improved and fever broke (after a few relapses) and i got to come home. it was taxing. exhausting. but my family, the BHE's family, and my friends and coworkers were extremely supportive. and now i'm home.

now more later. must rest.

Where Did I Go?

sorry about the forever long delay between messages. i've been on a much needed vacation this last week. up in the woods with my family is just what the PA ordered.

last week i was on the floor following post-op patients but i'm with a new group of surgeons (we rotate every 6 months) so this was a veeeery laid back week compared to when i follow the other group. i got to see and do some interesting things and also was able to scrub in the OR at least once a day, since i had all luxurious afternoon time after i was done rounding. it was very tra-la!

i will be more diligent about blogging once i'm back from vaca. hope all is well out there...

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.....