I'm currently on the Interventional Radiology (IR) Service, a clinically oriented radiology service that runs a lot like surgery. Where as on most days I normally keep a sort of distance to patients as I'm only involved in interpreting their various imaging studies, on IR I'm brought back to my intern days of rounding, and talking to patients, and filling out orders.
anyway, here are a few highlights:
- anytime I walk through the emergency department I feel a slight twinge of guilt, that it may have been something I could have pursued where I have direct contact with patients. This twinge quickly disappears. Always. The trigger this time being the smell of human excrement left on a bed by a patient, which emanated throughout the room.
- That's the one thing watching all those medical shows on TV don't truly capture. The olfactory sense of medicine. In every ER I've been through, I smell the same rancid smell. Body odor, urine, feces, alcohol from drunks, vomit, cleaning solution, and when the patients get hungry, cafeteria food. The slightest whiff of this pungent mixture makes me ecstatic about choosing radiology, where I can work in a sterile room with a computer.
- To all the aspiring premeds - I dare you to write about this!
- I met a patient who thanked me profusely for doing the most basic procedure on him. The expression of gratitude by a patient is so rare in this field, that it's sort of expected that they just won't. It's always a pleasant surprise when it actually does happen.
- I met a teen couple who put their complete faith in everything I had to say regarding their sick infant, which was a little scary.
- I bonded with a patient, a grown man, over how fussy and emotional and sometimes annoying, mothers could be concerning their sick children (no matter how old the child is), and yet how necessary this is, as time and time again, I've seen in a hospital that the last and sometimes only person by the bedside is the mother.
- I saw how deep the love of a mother is for a patient who had pretty much lost control of his body and all executive faculties.
- I saw how deep the love of a young couple was, as the wife of the patient was giving me a hard time over the phone regarding the treatment of her husband. She knew everything that was going on, and was in tune with his care and wanted to know the indications of everything we were doing. I wasn't offended by this because I could understand where she was coming from and I couldn't help but marvel at the depth of their love.
Went to a Kings game, and man, are they horrible. They have the worst record in the league. Truly queens.
The bright side was that the Houston Rockets were in town, and I got to see Yao Ming in person. The seats are about 15 rows behind the court, so I could see just how big he was. At 7'6", he made even Dikembe Mutumbo look short who is 7'2" by the way.
We were close enough where I could here Yao scream "GO!!!" in a frustrated voice at one of his team mates who wasn't cutting at the right moment.
The thing that amazed me the most was how big Yao Ming's calves were. You don't get a sense of those tree trunk legs from watching TV, but at the game... damn... his calves themselves were like redwoods. Where did they find a chinaman like this??? Krypton?
This was a question I saw posed on one of the xanga threads.
At first I thought the most annoying person is someone with a colicky baby, you know, the ones that keep crying and crying and crying. But then I imagine, how uncomfortable it is for the parent, and how just about every new parent has to go through this. So these people get a pass.
Next up, was the big fat person who overflows onto your side of the chair, and causes you to lean uncomfortably away from due to their sheer mass.... you end up leaning so much during the entire flight you fear you may develop a permanent scoliosis. For a while, these people took the prize as most annoying to fly with.
However, a few months ago, I found someone who usurped the prize. As the flight was going on, there was a background of noise consisting of the low hum of the air plane and the sounds of hushed conversations, penetrated with brief laughter, I heard the unmistakable high pitched sound of a nail being clipped. Now my first thought was, "perhaps this person has a hang nail, which required immediate attention, and if so, then public nail clipping, although disgusting, is acceptable." But then I heard the sound.. again... and again... and again.
And when I leaned across the aisle, I saw the culprit, an elderly lady who was clipping her finger nails, and flicking them onto the ground. BLEAGH. This is one of those hygene things that I think should be done in the quiet of your own home, and not on an airplane. Nasty.
Am I wrong?
Also, I was reading some of my old entries, and was impressed by my own wit at my entry talking about my malfunctioning "U" button. Is it weird that my own entry could make me laugh outloud?
