i tie my nose with a spandex hose before i get a drink

wow...nearly 2 weeks have elapsed since my last rant. how much has changed! well, ok, not really much has changed, but it's nice to pretend sometimes.

allow me to summarize what has transpired since march 1: i finished my stint in the ccu and with that my 2nd call month in a row--hooray! as i recall, my last days there were mostly uneventful. i became ill rather suddenly on saturday--congestion, runny nose, copious sneezing--which in the end worked out well for me since because i looked so infirmed everyone insisted that i go home early. i spent the rest of the day on the couch feeling rather horrendous. much to my surprise, by sunday morning i was feeling nearly normal; perhaps my shortest cold ever?

i was on-call on my last day, which can be terrible, since it means that you might have to work overnight and then get up the following morning and go to whatever service you switch to. i was lucky in that i went to an ED month and was not working the next day so it turned into an afternoon off. call was rather uneventful from a medical standpoint. i did, however, get a piece of bad news from a friend. it seems that he overheard some nurses discussing an intern who was particularly cantankerous when returning phone calls at night. you, dear reader, can probably guess the identity of said grouch. yes, it was in fact one s. crtiwick. that designation is probably deserved; so it goes. once i heard this bit of info, i tried to be more patient, although that didn't last too long. i will not turn this post into another rant about nursing staff, so that is all i have to say on that subject.

i moved back to the ED after that, a move about which i was quite excited. none of the 4 shifts that worked before going on vacation--where i am now--were particularly exciting, much to my chagrin, despite working overnight on friday, and saturday. here are some of the highlights (or lowlights): a heated argument with an attending that started as a discussion about evidence-based medicine and degenerated substantially, particularly after it became clear that said attending did not know the definition (literally) of the word "semantic." i was sprayed with purulent urine while helping an attending change a suprapubic foley catheter. i was then verbally abused by this same patient and his wife who returned 3 days later when the replacement catheter fell out, blaming me, even though i hadn't actually played any role in the prior changing--i basically watched--and was asked several times if i was a "real doctor." i insisted that i was, even going so far as to show my ID badge with the illustrious "MD" after my name (although i made sure to keep my thumb over part of my name in hopes that she might not be able to later identify me by name--not that anything improper was done, but more because i don't want these two idiots bad-mouthing me for something that was a minor issue, and nobody's fault in the first place.

to end on a positive note, i did see 2 cardiac patients, and being fresh out of the ccu, i was all over them like stink on a monkey. that was satisfying.

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"I want you to look me in my eyes; I haven’t slept a peaceful night in more than seventeen years. I am incapable of human connection. I am constantly in danger of drifting into total mental oblivion. These eyes, they looked upon the earth and saw an inconsequential particle in an incomprehensible, infinite universe. You think the Jets have a shot this season? I walked on the fucking moon. Thanks for the drink”

- Neil Armstrong