Month: April 2007

Caffeine, panadol, and the 4am breakfast

Well I’m back in ED and back working the overnight shift again for a week.

I actually came up with the title for this entry last year when I found myself surviving my overnight stints in ED with a combination of (carbonated) caffeine to stay perky, regular panadol to stave off the inevitable headache, and wierd eating habits, particularly having dinner at 9 or 10pm just before you go to work, and breakfast at 3 or 4am when you get peckish.

Tonight we managed to get all our patients sorted out by about 3am, so since then we’ve been in the unusual situation of finalising the last few extra-for-experts jobs on our remaining patients, chatting about the kinds of incessant crap that you talk about at 3am, and reading novels/trashy magazines/new scientists (depending whether you’re the intern, the head nurse, or myself (respectively)).

Luckily (or unlickily depending on how you look at it) the sun is starting to think about peeking it’s head up as I am writing this, and that means that it’s not too long until the morning staff come on and we can go home, but also not long before everyone starts waking up and realising that they’re sore/sick/bored and need to come up to the hospital.

That’s probably enough early morning incoherence for the moment.

If only I wasn’t working

Last year, when our Italy trip was still in the ideas stage, my friend Phil put forward an idea to go to the Caribbean to watch the Cricket World Cup, and now that it’s here I’m quietly wishing that I had more holiday leave up my sleeve so that I could go and do it (after my Italy holiday). It’d be great to go to the Caribbean, and the cricket so far seems to have been pretty good to :-).

Apparently Phil has a favorite island where one of his favorite authors lived, and he thought that this would have been an excellent excuse to entertain both his fascination with the island and his enjoyment of cricket. I think we could even convince the girls to come along too, with promises of tropical beaches and exotic cocktails (although I’m not sure how many matches we’d get them along to).

Ah well. Dreams are free.

Call me sentimental

The other night we had a patient come into ED who subsequently died.

He was an elderly aboriginal gentleman and his relatives told us that during his life he had been a pastor and a renowned artist and an elder in the community.

When he died I had to lift his head up in order to remove the oxygen mask, and I was surprised how heavy his head was. The rational part of my brain said that it was because there were no longer any muscles supporting the weight of his head, but the sentimental part of my brain couldn’t help but pipe up and suggest quietly that perhaps the reason it was so heavy was because he was an important man, and that his was a head that was full of an awful lot of wisdom.

My girl the rev head

About a month back we were flicking channels on a saturday night, and there wasn’t much on, and we found Top Gear was on. Now I essentially had the TV on as some background noise while I did other things, but Simone rather took to the show and has subsequently watched it most saturdays.

It’s not because she goes out of the way to watch it, or that she has any particular fascination of cars, but she enjoys their tendency to not take things too seriously, with things like playing soccer in cars, and racing a car and an aeroplane from Italy to England, coupled with the rather dry wit of the presenters.

I have to admit that I too quite enjoy watching it (and am always astonished by the variety of introductions they come up with for their test driver), but it’s just a bit more unexpected that Simone would get into it.

Guess there’s still plenty of stuff to learn about my girl 🙂

Science Schmience

A couple of cool science things I’ve seen recently:

First comes an article about using genetic engineering to modify the photo-receptors in mice to allow them to see in three colours instead of the usual two (with appropriate experiments to allow them to test that they can actually distinguish the added colours). The article also has a bit on something else kinda cool, which is looking for women who, because of an x-linked mutation, end up with 4 kinds of colour photoreceptors instead of the usual 3, and as such can distinguish significantly more colours.

Next comes a group who claim to have developed a way to use enzymes to remove the A and B bloodgroup antigens from the surface of blood cells, turning all blood into group O. Now this is useful because O group blood can be given to patients with any blood group (for a moment we’ll ignore the -ve and +ve blood groups, which are much less of a problem) and so may help manage our shortages of blood for transfusions.

Penultimately is a thing on BBC about the possibility of planets forming in binary star systems (ie with two suns). Apparently it’s possible, and would sure make for some pretty sunsets – they keep on referring to the one in star wars, although I think the one in Pitch black is much more impressive.
And finally comes something today about how they think they have spotted the (rather large) openings for caves on the surface of mars.