Vacation Equals Blog Post

Well it's that time again. I went on vacation, so I finally have something noteworthy to talk about. This week, I drove to NJ (right outside of Philadelphia) to hang out with one of my best friends from High School. We spent the day hanging out in Philly, and ate dinner here.

The next day, I rode a train to NYC and went to a Yankee game. It was my first time at the New Yankee Stadium. Not only did the Yankees win, but A-rod hit the 600th homerun of his career. In case you care, this is what it looked like...



Vacations are awesome. This year has been fun, but it's been incredibly busy. This year, I do many of the same things I did last year. I take overnight call about every 5 days, but this year when I take call I cover the surgical ICUs at the hospital. I love working in the ICU, the patient's are more complicated and you get to do a lot more procedures. The only con to working in the ICU, is that you stay so busy you do not really get to relax or process what happens. From the outside looking in, it would probably seem like I am unaffected by the things I see and do, but that's not true. There are just always other things to do, labs to review, or patients to see. Time just is not available to sit and think about things, but you do have patient's that stick with you in spite of how busy things get.

The other day we had a patient come in to the hospital that was over 100 years old. She had seen the Industrial Revolution, The Great Depression, The New Deal, Prohibition, The Cuban Missile Crisis, The Civil Rights Movement, Watergate, the Fall of the Soviet Union, WWI, WWII, The Cold War, The Korean War, The Vietnam War, Iraq twice, and EVEN the Jersey Shore. She is a national treasure. However, when she came in to the emergency room she needed an operation, which is no small feat considering her other medical problems and age. We admitted her to the ICU, and they asked me to place the IV's that she would need for surgery. They have to be placed by the doctors, because one goes in to a central vein in the neck and the other goes in to an artery in the wrist. As I was placing the IVs (which takes about an hour), and in between my "You're doing great's," I tried to talk to her as much as she could. She started to tell me about her children (3 girls and 1 boy). I had already met her youngest daughter (a spry 80 year old woman), who signed the surgical consent, so I commented on what a lovely lady she was. She thanked me and began bragging about her other 3 children, as she talked I decided to lighten the mood by asking, "Ma'am, which one of your children is your favorite?" I grinned like I sometimes do, the nurse snickered (the "I can't believe you asked that" snicker), but the woman got a very serious look on her face. She paused and said, "My favorite child is the one that needs it the most..."

I thought immediately of my own parents, and especially my mom, who tells me I am her favorite child whenever I ask which child is her favorite. My mom and dad have always had a spider-sense for when I have been in trouble and needed them, and then adjusted their "preferences" accordingly. They have an unseen and unspoken connection to my soul. It's that connection that makes seeing the accomplishments of a baseball player, I will never meet, pale in comparison to seeing the G-man's 600th step, Little Miss' 600th scowl, hearing Heinz's 600th hunting story, or Pumer's 600th confusing computer story, my businessman brother's 600th tale of hammering some poor auditee, my sister's 600th stalker and/or Wild'n Out with her BFF story, or the Hobbit's 600th attempt to get me, using rain soaked note paper. That's why each of them is my favorite...

Welcome back… Welcome back… Welcome back…

It’s always nice to go on vacation. I love seeing my family, taking “family pictures” with 10/13 of them, and getting one more test out of the way.

However, no good deed goes unpunished (not sure if that’s even applicable… I may not even understand that phrase), but the point is that I got back to work this week. Without getting into the numbers, I worked a TON. Not that it was all paperwork and minutia designed by some pencil-pusher to make my life miserable. I got to do things that I’ve never done before, and was allowed to do most of the surgeries I participated in. And honestly, if I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t have done it any differently… Not sure if it’s possible to write a more cryptic paragraph than the one I just did, but you get what you get…

Being back at work, I realize that there are a lot of different characters in the hospital. I form opinions about them quickly, usually based on very short interactions. Who knows, maybe they aren’t really characters at all. Maybe it's just that my interactions with them are limited so I only have enough time to notice their character flaws. Take me, for instance, I wouldn’t ever call myself patient. However, the people who interact with me on a limited basis may never see that occasionally, I’m... ummm... more patient?... I think this applies to more than just the hospital...

Take for instance the annual softball game that we played this week against the surgery residents at the hospital on the other side of the town. Granted it was a limited interaction, but when you show up for a “fun” softball game against the cross-town rivals, you expect it to be a pretty laid-back atmosphere. You think to yourself, how seriously can antibiotic-joke-telling-out-of-shape nerds take an athletic event? You throw on an old t-shirt, some gym shorts and running shoes. You drive across town, show up a few minutes late, find your team already engaged in the consumption of pre-game “adult beverages.” You smile, tell a few jokes, and look across the diamond to see what the other team is working with. Across the diamond, you see multiple players with sweat bands on both arms, high knee baseball socks, batting gloves on both hands, and cleats (like this). Again, it’s a limited interaction but you can’t help but draw conclusions from it... including, but not limited to, “Man! Someone is taking this more serious than we are!!”

Well, let's just say that at the end of the seven innings it made our 10-6 winner that much sweeter...

A Moment of Clarity

Ever have one of those moments in life, where you take a look at your life and wonder how you got to a particular point… or where things went wrong? I have these moments from time to time, a couple from this week went like this…

I was doing an inguinal hernia repair with one of my attendings (hospital code for physician in charge of a teaching service), and I thought to myself, “How exactly did I get to this point?...”

The other was more pronounced, more poignant as well. It’s kind of a long story, and the details only make the conclusion more impressive, but it happened during ICU Rounds. Where the team, that I am currently on, goes to the ICU and discusses an ICU patient and their care. A great opportunity for teaching, and learning but it’s spontaneous as well so sometimes things get a little punchy… and jokes start to roll. Without worsening your opinion of me let’s just say that I found myself involved in a large group of people laughing at a joke whose punch line was, “Ancef*? That covers that right?...” As I stared at the jubilant faces of the crowd, I had my moment of clarity. And I realized, “Man! I’m a huge nerd!”



*Ancef is an antibiotic

Cleaning out my closet...

Lot's ground to cover so let's get going.

-When I was home I went snowboarding with my brother, brother's friend, sister, sister's friend (who insists that I shout at her, but I refuse), and my friend. It was fantastic. Not only was the weather perfect, but there were fireworks and we finished the night with a trip to La Frontera. Really a Tour de Force. I just don't know if there's a better way to slam one's body, face, or butt into a hard surface than snowboarding. I mean if I slammed my face into anything else that hard, I would stop immediately. But I guess because you're stuck at the top of the mountain, you insist on getting back on the board... good times...

- After my trip, I flew back to NC. Sadly, I came home missing my family, but with more questions than answers. Specifically, there's a place in the Raleigh Airport Terminal (you know the place you can't get without a boarding pass) with a neon sign above it that says, "Shop, Dine, Relax." Ummmm, so let me get this straight? I can't get to your particular business unless I have another place to go... and you want me to not only shop and dine... but also relax?... When?... How?...

- Now that I'm home, I'm really busy. It's good to be back in the groove, but it's taxing at times. For instance, 2 nights ago I was on call. A sweet old woman admitted to the hospital for dehydration, started telling me about how her back hurt. All the tests were normal... it was definitely muscle pain. She asked if the IV fluid we were giving her for dehydration could be causing the muscle pain. I reassured her (with the nurse present) that, if anything, the dehydrated muscles would be made better by the IV fluid. 20 minutes later, I got a call from the patient's nurse, asking me if I would write an order to stop the IV fluid, because the patient thought it was causing her pain. Really?... stop the IV fluid?... really?

Obviously, it's been a scattered but enjoyable couple of months....

So this is Christmas

One of the not-so-glamorous parts of my job is the hours (well that and giving people rectal exams, but the hours are bad too). It doesn’t leave you with a lot of options, especially for things that happen from 9-5 or on holidays. For example, I got 4 days off for Christmas, and while it's nice, it wasn’t enough time to go home. So what do you do in Chapel Hill (a college town) on Christmas? Well if you think dinner is on the agenda, you may be disappointed. Here’s how the night went down.

One of the other residents and I decide to hang out. He’s an Italian kid from Jersey. He’s Jersey enough to know people like those recently seen on “The Jersey Shore,” but normal enough to be embarrassed by them. Naturally, I call him “The Situation,” and mostly because it drives him crazy when I do. Around 5 o’clock TS and I try to hammer out some dinner plans. We start to call around for a reservation at the upscale restaurants in town (I mean it is Christmas right?). We find precisely 2 restaurants that are open, 1) has a dress code (not a big deal if you have time to change), and their last reservation is for a seating in about 10 minutes and 2) does not have any reservations the rest of the night. We’re beside ourselves, scouring the internet in search of new options, and cursing the fact that only 2/45 restaurants are open. We come up with a plan that goes like this, get ready and drive 25 minutes to Raleigh in search of an open restaurant. At this point we’re 1.5 hours into this thing, and we’re not going home without dinner. We drive around, but Raleigh looks like a scene from I Am Legend (i.e. we are alone on the streets). Finally, we find an Italian restaurant in a hotel in Raleigh. TS and I head in and get on the list. They tell us that the wait is about 40 minutes (again, we have too much invested at this point to give up now). So we head to the bar and grab drinks (I’m working on like my fifth Diet Coke of the night and at this point my I’m down-right jittery). 40 minutes later, we finally get a table.

As previously stated, TS has a strong Italian heritage and suggests that, “We should make this like a traditional Italian meal, with appetizer, pasta course, then an entrée.” To which I responded, “Why the hell not?! I mean it’s Christmas!” I get shrimp risotto, we split an order of spaghetti, and I finish with steak (an amateur’s version of rare). Dinner’s great and me and my buddy are chatting up the waiter about things to do in Raleigh. At which point, the waiter asks us where we’re from. I say, “Utah;” and TS replies “New Jersey.” To which the waiter responds, “Oh yeah? I love Jersey! I go up to Asbury Park all the time… I have a bunch of gay friends up there.” TS and I shoot each other a quick look, which we both immediately interpret as “Did he really just imply that WE might be gay?” The waiter wraps up his schmoozing, and TS and I start dying. I guess two guys can’t get dressed up, share a plate of pasta on a traditionally family oriented holiday without there being something sexual attached to it! I mean what’s the world coming to?!?

The Winter Storm of 2009...

So apparently winters in North Carolina are what most people would call mild. Usually 40's-50's with dips way down into the 20's and 30's. Infrequently, it "snows." Meaning a few inches of slushy, non-stick snow. When things get "bad," people panic. Bread, milk, and beer (the essentials I guess?) go flying off the shelves like New Moon posters in Santa's Secret Shoppe in Junior Highs around the country. This last weekend, we had several severe weather warnings for the weekend. The Meteorologists billed it as a disaster, even going so far as to call it "The Winter Storm of 2009." With this sort of reporting, it's no wonder that the storm was all anyone was talking about. People were saying things like, "We're getting snow this weekend", "I'm not going outside that," and "It's getting so bad that we may have to reinact The Lord of the Flies or the Donner Party and what-not." I mean I was worried...

I got off of work around 8PM on Friday, and headed out to a friend's house for a little Christmas socializing. There were about 1-2 inches of slushy snow on the ground, and half of the people cancelled their RSVPs for the party because of it. When I got to the hospital on Saturday morning, this "storm" had people terrified. Doctors, nurses, janitors and anyone else who worked in the hospital were making plans like, "I'm probably going to spend the entire weekend in the hospital," "I should have gone to the store last night to get bread and milk," or "I may have to sell everything I own to buy a gun to shoot myself... it's really my only option."

So when I got off of work on Sunday (after ~30 hours of work), I was terrified about what might await me on the outside. I figured even if all the predictions were overestimations, I was still going to be walking into Santa's front yard. And this is what terribleness awaited me as I walked out of the hospital...


You can imagine how cold I felt...

My Front Porch Looking In....

I have had a lot of ideas in my lifetime. Some good, some bad, and some terrible. One of my more recent terrible ideas was to sell all of my furniture prior to moving to NC from WI. It all made sense at the time. I would sell my stuff for about what I paid for it in Utah, take that money and spend it on new stuff in NC. Thus recouping some of the money I had spent in the first place and saving the moving expenses that I would need to get the aforementioned possessions to NC.

This sounds great on paper, but that’s where the greatness ended for me. Things went south, well, right at the beginning. So early, in fact, that I am not sure I ever actually headed north. The problem started with my underestimation of the WI-used-furniture market. To say that I underestimated the robust nature of the furniture market in WI, is like saying the Grand Canyon is big, War and Peace is long, or my dad is argumentative. None of these analogies comes close to adequately describing the epic failure that was my underestimation, the massive nature of the Grand Canyon, the effort required to read War and Peace, or the frequency and intensity with which my dad likes to give me the business.

What does any of this have to do with anything? Well since that epic failure, I have been replacing my old furniture bit by bit while at the same time paying down my credit cards. The precarious position in which I find myself, reminds me a lot of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. You know, finding a little something here and a little something there (I know it’s a stretch but bare with me… it’s the closest I’ll probably ever get to feeling like my mountain man older brother). So, bit by bit, I have been adding my collection. I started with a couch; and, through the suggestion of my sister, added the rug. The ottoman was my own, most recent, decision. To make a long story short, it’s started to make my living room feel like home. I realize that I still have a long way to go, but even the little additions have helped me feel much more at home. Which as far away as I am from my family at this time of year… means a lot.