Nearing the Finish Line

At precisely 6:00 pm tonight, I walked out of the ER for the last time this month. I had admitted the last patient of the shift, and our call was officially over. And thus call ends for this resident for yet another month. Tomorrow and Wednesday are mop up days for the team and then Wednesday afternoon is sweet release.

Only 4 patients admitted today, which was a nice light load on the last call day when some of the other residents and I had already “mentally checked out” in terms of working hard.

I have a few more moving tasks to do and then Wednesday there will be some beer pong and barbeque at Pete’s house followed by a little Spider-Man 2 (E. Boogaloo). I can’t wait. After that, I have a 4 day weekend in Seattle coming up – it will be all about splitting the days between working on my new place and then hitting the town hard. Pumped!

It’s been kind of a long month, will nearly all my time spent working, moving, or doing move-related tasks. For you non-medicine types, here are some the things I did in the hospital this month:

-Looked a man with newly discovered pancreatic cancer right in the eyes and somberly told him he was going to die from it (and sooner rather than later). This was at 2 am in the morning.

-Tapped 4 Liters of peritoneal fluid out of a lady today. I.e, her liver was congested (from metastatic breast cancer), the blood going through the liver is clogged, the osmotic pressure backs up and excess fluid spills into her abdomen. Cue me, with sharp needle and Paracentesis Kit ™ - I stick her with the needle and pull off 4 liters of golden body fluid – right out of her abdomen. She actually feels better after all this is done. Mmm.

-There was a week or so this month when just about all my patients, among their other problems, were alarmingly constipated. I transformed into an enema fairy, ordering stool softeners and enemas like candy. There’s a difficult-to-describe joy surrounding walking into a patient’s room in the morning (the day after you’ve ordered all the stool medicines) and before you even ask them if they had a bowel movement, you simply look at them and know they did. (you can see it in their grateful eyes…)

-There were a couple of crazy “codes”. (A “code” is a “cardiac arrest”, or “everyone-stop-what-you’re-doing-and-run-like-hell-to-this patient’s-room-and-help-resuscitate-him”). One code I had was straight out of the show ER. A man went into cardiac arrest on the floor. When I got there, a nurse was sitting on his chest doing CPR and some other docs were hooking up the defibrillator. A moment later, “CLEAR!” was yelled and we shocked his heart back into an appropriate rhythm. We intubated him without sedation. As me and 3 other docs were rushing him to the ICU, he suddenly came alert (probably from his heart being back in a proper rhythm) and he went nuts. He had this tube down his throat (to breathe for him) and he had no idea what was going on. He was also withdrawing from alcohol (being an alcoholic). He was a huge guy, and he starting going ballistic, winging his arms around everywhere. His IV’s all got yanked with blood beginning to seep out. He reached for the tube in his throat (to pull it out). We tried to stop his arm, but this moose of a man was too strong. With me and a nurse using all our force to hold him back, he slowly inched his hand, muscles bulging, toward the tube in his mouth. It was like a slow motion movie scene. We couldn’t stop him. When he got there, he gripped down hard and yanked that thing straight out and spit up blood everywhere. (the tube, when in position, has an air cuff at the end which inflates, thus holding it in place – when someone pulls it out like that, they pull it out with the cuff inflated and thus drag a big plastic, air-inflated bulb, from inside their lungs and outside their trachea – the bulb is bigger than the pathway – i.e. not good). It took a whole team of docs and nurses to subdue this guy before we could get him properly sedated. The most hilarious thing of all, was that after it was done, I realized that all his tube yanking and blood gushing had occurred in the hallway (between the floor and the ICU) and we had actually stopped the bed to wrestle this bear-man right in front of the family waiting area for the ICU.

(Therefore, picture this: You’re a distraught family member of an ICU patient. You sit in the lonely room, thinking about your sick mother and the world in general. All of a sudden, a rush of people appear outside the window. A team of nurses and docs and a huge, psychotic, delirious patient are absolutely brawling. Docs are being flung around like rag dolls, IV’s are pulled out and blood is spilling. Then this behemoth of a man, in crazy hulk fashion, against all force, pulls out his own endotracheal tube and spits blood everywhere while he tries to sit up as more nurses and docs arrive to try and subdue this beast. And this is the hospital your relative is at….)

I can’t even imagine. Good stuff – we were laughing about that for awhile.

-I took care of a 20-year-old soldier who fell 9 stories in Bangkok Thailand while drunk and lived. His legs and back were fractured all over. We were seeing him for fevers he developed in the hospital. 9 stories. Damn.

-And many more

But I’m tired of typing. I guess some of the mundane stuff I do these days would still be exciting or crazy to people not in “the biz”. I’ll try and keep coming with the stories – it seems people enjoy them.

2 more days of wards. Then sweet parole. And Seattle.




It’s hip to blog square…

I sit here poised on the eve of Mega-Call, my final 36-hour dance with the call gods. Today was a day off for me, my 4th in as many weeks. I have 6 days of work remaining before freedom, sweet freedom embraces me and sets me loose. I wish for freedom so much these days, I feel like President Bush.

Unfortunately today, like most of my days off this month, was spent moving. Sweet Gwendolyn helped me today – we went to the old place and finished up a lot of cleaning. What remains now in my old place is the following: my kitchen table which is disassembled and ready to be hauled to Petes, 6 accompanying chairs, my bike, a basketball, my broom, my vacuum, some supplies to wash my car with, some papertowels, a bottle of 409 for the final wipe-down, and my old computer.

Speaking of the old computer, I fired it up today – it was sluggish, downright slow even. But once it warmed up, it really started to hum and I searched the old hard drive for usable stuff. There was some old written stuff, some MLOM stuff, and a ton of MP3’s and little video shorts (like Kids in the Hall and SNL sketched). After a quick conversation with Eryn, I decided to keep it and use it as an MP3 server. The monitor will have to go. I trashed the old printer today, as well as old, near-useless scanner. We hauled off a bunch more stuff to good will – good old action desk is mine no longer.

I will have something to say, I’m sure, regarding the nature of moving when all is said and done. It hit me today, as the final steps were occurring at the old pad, that I was leaving it. I spent the last 2 years of my life there. Tumultuous years, at the least, grossly unstable years with more thought. It’s always a little emotional to finally leave a place you’ve called home. The room I slept in – my kitchen, my family room. My old comfort zones. All will be gone soon, out of my reach. This used to be my playground…

I have a foolish little ritual whenever I say the final good bye to a place. I walk into each room, stand there for 10 seconds or so, and think about some of the things that have happened there. It’s a tad ridiculous, I realize, but in some weird way it’s like a movie scene where a character has a split-second flashback. I walk to the door frame. I pause, I think, and several key events play themselves out in my head in a manner of seconds while I stand there staring. Then I say goodbye, and the room is dismissed. I don’t know why I do it – I suppose it’s because I’m emotional at good byes. I’ve done it ever since junior high. I remember my old bedroom in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. Ever since, I’ve done it to every room in every place I’ve ever been to. Odd, I know. I still recall the old Lakewood pad from senior year of college. A defining year – saying goodbye to that place was tough.

It’s interesting to think how my life changed at 5016 Fairwood Blvd. Apt 268. I can sure as hell say I’m a different man now than when I walked into the place. Wow. I’m certainly not gifted enough a writer to try and describe the change. But I can say that I have definitely adopted a newer, onward and upward type theme. I’ve said good-bye to a lot of my old crap the last few weeks. Stuff I’d hung onto over the years more out of nostalgia than anything else. With this move,I ’ve turned from a nostalgic softie into a Darwinian utilitarian – only the strong and useful items amongst my stuff hath survived.

I’m looking forward to the day when my old place is completely behind me. There is a view of Mount Rainier that I will miss. In the summer, I could stare at it for hours on a clear day. I think I have a picture of it somewhere on one of my digital camera flash cards. But I’ve traded that view now, for a different kind of view. I’ve gone from peaceful mountain to dynamic skyline, from silent contemplation to urban madness. One year in the city, coming up. Nothing beats the anticipation of that. There will be other mountain views in my life, I suspect. But this may very well be my only year to live IN the city. The anticipation of that fact, I must say, has me definitively giddy.

More to follow.


When I come home….on the telephone…I hear you waiting for me…

Don’t know where that came from, but oh well deal with it. I just finished watching the sunset (at 9:15 pm) from my roof of my new apartment building. Just me and a beer 6 stories up on Capitol Hill taking in the sight of the setting sun over the city skyline, all silhouetted with the Olympic Mountain range over the Puget Sound as a back drop. Good shit. Next time I’ll bring my camera up there.

Ah, the move continues – I’m down to a few final tasks at the old place – namely moving my mountain bike and some other assorted odds and ends (less than a cab full at this point). Then, I have to give a few more things to goodwill (my desk, mainly), decide what to do with my old computer (it may get scrapped) – and then, lastly, clean the place up. Feels good to be close to being done. After that, it’s just a matter of fine tuning the new place and I’ll be ready for some hard core city livin’.

I’ve noticed, during this move, that dust triggers a serious reaction in me. I knew I was allergic to dust mites before (medical fact: dust mite allergy is 1 of the top 3 prevalent allergies nation-wide. Also in the top 3 – cockroach shit allergy – suck on that!), but I hadn’t been so affected by them until now. So, my old place is just a mess of dust now and when I go in there I eventually develop a multitude of annoying sneeze attacks. I’m out of my beloved Zyrtec and so I go through about a half a box of tissues per visit. And everyone who knows me knows how damn annoying it is for me to hear me blow my nose.

I got a new cell phone on Friday with a new (Seattle area code) phone number so if you want it and don’t have it – email me. My new phone is sweet – it’s a camera phone and though I thought the feature wouldn’t be all that useful I find myself playing with it all the time. It should make for some good documentation of drunken nights out. Reminds me of Japan in that way and everyone’s obsession with photos and photo-booths in particular. Plus, I can email those bad boys straight to my email account and thus have them later to post up. Again, the possibilities intrigue me.

Work continues to grind on – I think I have about 9 days left on the wards. There should be 1 or 2 more days off in there, so it’s not unbearable, but man I can’t wait for it to end. Then I have 3 months (3 MONTHS!) of all my weekends off and almost no call. I haven’t had that since med school. It should be a fun summer come July 1st. If only I could figure out what I want to do with my life professionally. (After I go to Iraq, that is…)

And with that, I clicked on Mick Flicks the other day and found it to be woefully underwritten. Ah, the point of it is to put thoughts down about movies when I see them. I simply haven’t had the time. Hopefully I can update it soon. I haven’t seen a movie in a while – that should also change come July 1st.

Bedtime for bonzo, come on kids…


OOO-EEE – SEATTLE STYLE!

Make-a-Mick Smile. First post from 1610 Belmont Ave – got it. Not too much to say on this new post. I’m hitting the nadir of my caffeine ingestion for the morning and hence my typing is fast and frantic. It’s nice to be off work today, especially since it’s a beautiful day and I’ll be happily avoiding the president-visits-my-work circus.

Unbelievable the stops they pull out for the guy. They replanted everything in the planters where he’ll be entering the building. They washed all the outer windows. They put up view obstructing cloth and paper on every window and doorway where he’ll be walking buy (presumably to prevent snipers from taking him out – in a hospital – on a military base – can’t be too careful these days, I guess). They took out all the newspaper and soda machines and such along his path (some of them were probably laced with explosives). They’re reserved 2 ICU beds, just in case. Then they swept the parking lot and finally, they replaced all the signs (yup, all the STOP signs and NO PARKING signs are brand spanking new). So now the stop signs in the parking lot are redder than red. Why did they do all this? Not sure, but the president’s coming! Back breaking labor for young enlisted folks over the past three days just so the president can roll in for an hour or two and then leave. Will he notice anything? Probably not. Though I hear he likes to look at shiny things, so there might be a childlike google at the site of one of those new stop signs…

Gwen and I spent some time last night cleaning up the new apartment last night – it’s really starting to come together. I’ll post some pics up soon, hopefully. Today is loaded with various moving errands. I can’t wait to dump off tons of stuff at Goodwill today and be done with it forever. I have a new hatred of “stuff”. If it’s not routinely used, get rid of it, I say. I’ve halved my wardrobe – tossed an infinite amount of old receipts – hell I’m sitting with a trashbag full of papers at my shredder doing my best Enron impression as we speak. Sorry to say, the old Nintendo 64 will no longer be with me. That’s good bye to goldeneye and wrasslin’, possibly forever. I find that those old cartridges rust up over time so I don’t even know if they’re playable anymore. For good measure, I booted up that ancient lap top the other night – the one where Adam made his wrasslin’ program for us to keep stats. Oh, what a trip down memory lane. Buff Bagwell, Macho Man, Kevin Nash, P-Keg, Sumo-jo, and the rest. Life will be different without them. But it’s time. A hell of a program, Adman, once again. I’m glad to know that the game will be retired with me leading the power rankings…

With this move, I will officially have lived in 17 different abodes. That’s 6 places from age 0 to age 18, 8 total places in San Diego, and now 4 more since. (I know that adds up to 18, but my parent’s old house in San Diego counts for 2 of those categories, dammit!) The journey comprises 5 states. That’s a lot of moving – I guess I should be good it by now. Also consider my parents have lived in 3 different houses in two different states since leaving San Diego, and I don’t even know what home is anymore. Come to think of it, the simple question “Where are you from?” is sort of a long-winded answer coming from me.

OK, time to get moving before Friday traffic is out of control.
End of an Era

It’s June again. June has long been a time for change for old Discostup. In fact, looking back, from year to year, June has always been the most dynamic month of the year – full of change, comings and goings. This June is no different.

This is my last entry from Battlestation Tacoma. From here on out, it’s super-blogging Seattle-style. Tomorrow my high speed Internet is installed in the emerald city. Today, my computer leaves Tacoma. The last 2 weeks have been chock-full of downright bloggable activity. Sadly, the time to sit down and write just hasn’t been there. But today, post-call on 3 hours of sleep and with more moving to be done, time is being made.

The last post from Tacoma.

Let’s see – too much to talk about.

THE MOVE:

The move is going well, if perhaps a little arduous. I’d say I’m about 75-80% in Seattle now. What remains down here is my computer, mountain bike, and assorted storable items. A few lamps remain. A few kitchen items. Some things on my walls. There are several large pieces of furniture (desk, old night tables, etc) that won’t be making the trip up to the city. (Poor action desk just hasn’t been the same since that fateful moving day in San Diego when Iwan simply “wasn’t paying attention…”) I don’t sleep here anymore – I haven’t slept here in about 10 days. The nice thing about moving oneself is that it makes you stop and look around and all the complete SHIT you’ve accumulated. My ability to throw things away, or recycle things, or donate things, or sell things, has improved ten-fold over the past 10 days. I’ve come to rue the day my mom fell in love with sending me knick-knacks. Why do I have 6 collector’s edition Spider-man lunchboxes? Ugh, maybe a few of those can be left behind.

For the most part, the move has gone well. And then there’s the bed. Without telling the full story, I will say this – I watched my mattress fly out of my truck on I-5 at 65 mph. Obviously, it wasn’t tied down very well. After pulling over to the shoulder, Pete and I ran back down the shoulder of the freeway to get even with it. As we watched cars and trucks briskly switch lanes to avoid it, Pete mused, “Shit – I wonder if it’s still good?”

On cue, some poor sap in a Honda hit the mattress squarely at 70 mph and managed to bulldoze it several hundred yards up the freeway and finally over to the shoulder. I was mortified. Not for the mattress, but rather because I allowed it to not be secured and could have potentially killed someone. Luckily, everything was fine. (with the exception of the mattress). The guy’s car was fine. There was no large accident. The police officer didn’t even give me a ticket, though I probably deserved one.

With our tail between our legs, Pete and I hoisted the mutilated, black and ripped thing back into my truck and made off slowly with our hazard lights to the next exit. Soon the mattress was in a dumpster. The box spring remains, alone. (When it came time to finally move that, we secured the hell out of it on top of Pete’s truck – about midway through the drive, out came a downpour. So I drove about 15 miles behind Pete watching my box spring get doused. Something, somewhere, just doesn’t want my bed in Seattle. Hmm.)

But otherwise, the move is going well. My apartment is coming together. And though I’m on the wards and not able to enjoy it much yet, the few times I’ve had a night out down there have been great. I can’t wait until July 1st.

More to follow.

WORK

Wards, wards, wards. I’m not into being on the wards right now. The good thing is that my team is super-efficient, with two soon-to-be-third-year residents and a soon-to-be-second-year resident and a good staff doc. So we do what we can, keep the patients on the mend, and try and do our work and sign out early.

It’s also the time of year where the residency turns over. On July 1st, I’ll be a 3rd year resident. Sadly, as of last week, all the old 3rd year residents have graduated and are gone. It was sad last year, and it was sad again this year. Our Department of Medicine roast was a hit (this past Friday), and the last time I got to see a lot of those guys. I even won a “Best Actor” oscar statue for my staff impressions in the roast video this year. Go me. But it was sad to see those guys go. We’ve been here 2 years with them, and now they are all leaving for various fellowships and other things. Some will be in Iraq in a few months. I’ll be facing this kind of thing in exactly one year. That thought is a little sobering.

More to follow.

Speaking of work, the honored and privileged active duty military folk of Fort Lewis (my base) are getting a pretty important VIP visitor this week.

Check it out.

That’s right, old “W” himself will be rolling to Fort Lewis at the end of the week. Word has come down from hospital command that the prez will be cruising by the very hospital I work at. It’s hilarious, as we were walking around call on Sunday night watching battalions of cleaning teams scrub the hospital down inch by inch. It’s going to be a mad house – rumor has it that the president wants to visit some of the “war wounded” in our hospital. (Hilariously, he’s more likely to see people wounded from world war II or the Vietnam war than any current struggle, at least at our hospital). Regardless, the place will be in a tizzy. I expect it to take no less than 3 hours to cross the gate and get on base that day. All of us residents have been openly snickering at the idea of running into the president on the hospital floors we cruise around on a daily basis. They all laugh at me in particular. Ah, to meet that man. I don’t even know what to say…

More to follow.

OK, well, enough yammering for now. Hopefully posting will be a little more frequent once this compute is up and running in the sweet, sweet Emerald City. Today I have to pack this thing up, go by a new desk, and maybe even take a look at a new mattress. Till then.