Archived Blog
As the fount of all knowledge which is correct and unquestionable, apparently today is our second, and therefore “Beer and Pizza” anniversary.
Simone made the comment when I asked her what she had planned for tonight (she has some plan, but hasn’t told me what it is yet) and she said that the second anniversary was the beer and Pizza anniversary (the first being “paper”, I think), so that was what we were doing, and after all, who am I to question such obvious truths….
🙂
I went shopping the other day for some shower cleaner, as the stuff we currently use seems to no longer be doing it’s job (it is a little old, so perhaps that’s the reason). Anyway, I got to the cleaning products isle and started looking.
Almost universally the bottles seemed to have (somewhere on their label) the claim that they contained “No harsh chemicals”, and I was miffed! I had stubborn grime (it’s actually not as bad as that, but seeing as that is the terminology that also seemed to appear on just about every bottle I though I should use it here too) to deal with, and dammit if I didn’t want those harsh chemicals so that I knew that the job was being done right.
One bottle even had the nerve to suggest (right below the bit about not containing harsh chemicals) that I should apply the product to the shower/bath surface daily for a fornight and at the end of said fortnight I would have a good-as-new shiny clean shower/bath. TWO WEEKS??? What are they thinking? I want to clean the shower once every 2 weeks, not every day for two weeks, and I want to know that it’s being done properly: hence the search for the good old fashioned caustic chemicals. Frankly I don’t care if I come out with chlorine’d red eyes, and immaculately sterile drain pipes (it goes to the treatment plant anyway, where it will be broken down).
Am I the only one who feels like this?
This evening I spent the last 4 hours of my shift working very hard to fix one patient.
She came in following a fall with angina (heart pain). We found she had a low haemoglobin (bad), an acutely high creatinine (bad – means kidney failure), a very high blood potasium level (bad – can cause heart arrhythmias) and a metabolic acidosis (quite bad – means blood pH has become acidic which stuffs up all the chemical reactions that rely on a steady pH balance).
I spent the 4 hours doing all manner of things, in order to slowly move her from our initial assessment of “Oh crap, this lady might be going to die” to “Well, she looks better, and feels better, and her blood test results have improved. She might be able to go home after a few days in hospital”.
And she was a kindly and deserving old lady (not that most patients aren’t deserving, just some you can’t help feel are more deserving than others), which makes the suspicion that you may have earned her a few more months or years to spend with her family and friends all that more satisfying.
I found myself quietly grinning all the way home. This is what I love about my job.
(In fact I ended up seeing an uncharacteristicly small number of patients this shift, but they were all more-than-averagely-deserving individuals with interesting and non-straight forward problems, so the whole day was pretty satisfying – I even got to give a kid a piggy back ride up to the kids ward).
The above is a perenial favorite quote in the ramsay family, which was apparently uttered by my father as a child, after he had managed to coax and bribe one of the local stray cats to follow home back to his house one day.
He of course denies this is how it happened (but we don’t believe him for an instant).
Anyway. The point of this post is..
Today I got up and opened the door onto the patio (if you can call it that) to let Jack have a run around outside, which he duly did. About half an hour later I went into the kitchen to make myself a cuppa, and while I was there I heard this strange snuffling sound coming from behind me in the lounge, and turned around in time to be startled by a little black-with-grey-speckling puppy trotting into the kitchen.
He was little. He was friendly. He was boisterous. He was sooooo cute!!!
I wanted to keep him.
Instead however I lead him out to the front of the house and he trotted off down the street (I can only assume either to continue his adventuring, or to return home and tell his family about me).
He was very cute however. I could easily have been convinced to keep him if out situation was different. Jack wouldn’t mind. He’d be sure to let that dog know who’e boss. 🙂
But when I got home at 1:30am I found ice cold beer waiting for me in the fridge.
I’ve got the best girl ever!!!
A british minerologist has discovered Kryptonite in a Serbian mine…
Last week while I was doing nights we had a few mornings where everything got under control at about 5am, leaving us with a few hours to tidy up loose ends and get ready for the 7am rush (“I’ve just woken up and my
On one of those mornings I wandered out into the ambulance parking and out to the road. The Cairns Hospital looks out across the bay, and so it was rather a pretty moment, with the sun rising, the cool wind blowing gently, and the birds singing from the many trees nearby.
With all the natural beauty it took me a while to recognise the insanity also present in the scene: Dozens of people were up and taking brisk morning walks alone the shore front.
Now I was up at 6am because I was rostered and paid to be. They were up and active voluntarily.
Quite clearly they were insane. Pity there were no beds available in our mental health unit…
I stumbled upon this gallery of monochrome street art with a twist the other day.
I particularly like the various rat ones (rat cutting hold in sidewalk, rat breaking into locker…).
The house we are currently renting has been put on the market to be sold, and so we are in the ever so fun situation of having the land agent bring people through to see the house every two or three days, and Jack doesn’t like it one bit.
Having just lived with Simone and I, Jack is something of a ‘fraidy-cat when it comes to other people. If it’s friends of ours coming over for dinner he’s usually happy to watch them for a little while and then sidle over for some belly scratches and head pats, but when people just come into his home and stomp around and ignore him he’s not pleased at all.
In fact I’ve been told that he tends to tear into the spare bedroom and hide under the bed, or under the duvet on the bed, only to emerge after the strangers are gone and everything is quiet again.
Goodness knows how he’ll cope if we ever have kids…
For years it has been apparent that if money was the driving ambition in our careers we should have avoided poorly paying careers such as law or medicine, and instead trained as electricians, plumbers, builders or air conditioner installation people.
I was however amused the other day when we had to get an electrician out to look at our broken stove top, and at the end he said that he’s have his secretary call and sort out a time to come and replace it.
I suppose that it’s not exactly unexpected if you actually think about it, but until you do it seems a little instinctively incongruous that your friendly local tradesman in his dirty jeans and ute also has an office somewhere with it’s own secretary.