 THE UNBEARABLE HEAVINESS OF INTERESTING "I'm three, I mean four today, appah!" my little girl runs out of her room in Hello Kitty pajamas to inform me. "I know baby! You're a big girl now. I'll be back for the party," I reply before leaving for work.  To
work I drive. I park. I trudge. I resign mysef to the
day ahead with each step. Something inside me locks down as the
hospital doors slide open.
 I'm
post-call so I inform my colleagues via text pages about their new
patients - the ones I got called about all fucking night long.
New ones and sick ones get seen first. Actually, the coffee cafe
gets seen first. Life and death come after caffeine, otherwise
how can you be expected to tell the difference.
 I
must admit I like the design of the new hospital tower. Pastel
bile and geriatric slate are a lot less depressing than crap brown and
mucus beige everywhere. Four out of five suicidal depressed
patients have told me so.
 My
patient list isn't a bad one. A bald lady fighting lymphoma and
another about to be diagnosed with it. A jolly rectal
bleeder. A quiet psychotic. A bronchitic smoker. A
drug-seeking prisoner. A vertiginous Indian lady. A
cellulitic doctorate with a memory span of under five
minutes. Her showdog-training control-freak
patient-advocate-slash-daughter will not be missed though. She
thought I was great; I thought she was trying to train me like one of
her show dogs. Fetch
this.
 When
I ask one rambling old lady about her bowels, breathing, and everything
in between, she just says, "It's short. Isn't it?"
"What's short?" I finally bite. "This is. This life," she answers with thought. "Yeah, that's what I hear." The urologist's note for that day states, "Patient demented. Frequent nonsensical tangents."  Elevators
are the place for sighing and leaning. I jump in mid-descent just
to see if the laws of gravity have changed since the last time I
checked. They haven't.
 "I
saw your patient, Mr. Notlupus," Dr. Blackwater, the nephrologist tells
me on the phone. "His kidneys are better. I have no idea
why. He's quite the... interesting patient."
"Yeah, too interesting," I answer. "Ex-actly." Interesting. In my experience, it means answerless questions, wild goose chases, and a lot of frustration on all sides. It's only interesting to me if 1) there's an answer, 2) my patient gets better, and 3) in retrospect. Otherwise it's just a chance for medical students to act even more interested and academic attendings to wax their academic poles while nothing is actually helping the patient. Interesting is what you say when you're on the sidelines like watching war stories on TV. Interesting is not what you call it when you're in the middle of it. You don't want to be the "interesting" patient. Of course if you are, you already knew that.  Slow
day. Sometimes weekends are like that. Snowstorms, sudden
sunny days, holidays, the Superbowl. They make people ignore
their symptoms longer than usual, then they all bumrush the E.R.
afterwards.
 Overall, no one is worse, everyone is a little better today. A good day.
My work is done. I make haste for the exit. As any medical student knows: the longer you stay, the longer you stay. Stairs are quicker. Gravity helps.  Happiness is coming home.
The ride home is short, but it always seems long, in context. __________________________________________
GROUNDHOG PRINCESS DAY  I
got home from work just in time for my baby girl's birthday
party. Amy had ordered an Asian Barbie cake at Meijer's (they
actually had a black haired, tanned skin Barbie cake). Maybe they
thought she meant a blonde-haired Barbie with a secret
Asian-fetish or an Expatriate Barbie. I don't know.
 There
were a dozen or more people not pictured above. But they were all
married, so you shouldn't be looking anyways. That's Sun Su and
his cousin at the top sitting in my command center probably putting a
railgun beam through some alien's midbrain. Come on, with all the
Hello Kitty stuff around, we need to keep a balance here.
 They look innocent and cute, but in two minutes they are going to tear Barbie apart to the bone in pure sugar lust.
My baby girl is growing up so fast. Pretty soon she'll be old enough to do guillotine chokes and armbars on all the guys trying to get close to her.  After
the party, some of my in-laws stayed to watch the Ultimate Fighting
Championship. A few people from my jiu jitsu club came over and
watched too. I didn't sneak any pictures of them because every
one of them can break my arms, legs, and choke me out in six seconds:
that's the Brazilian Jiu Jitsu way! Nice guys though.
The cock-eyed guy in the picture (Tim Silvia) got CTFO (Choked The Fuck Out) later that night. Jiu jitsu for the win!  It's
kind of funny having these trained fighters, wrestlers, and grapplers,
watching Ultimate Fighting while sitting on Hello Kitty rugs and baby
furniture.
 Long day.
EMAIL: scott_to_trot[at]msn[dot]com |