Dave – Page 25 – Ramsay Family Classics

Viva le grand finale

In a reminder that synicism is so easy when working in the health system, this weekend was grand final weekend, with the AFL final on saturday, and the NRL final on sunday, and I was working both days.

Now the bit which inspired cynicism is that normally saturdays and sundays in ED, particularly the afternoons, are hectic with millions of people presenting, usually with pretty mundane complaints (I’ve had a cough for 5 weeks, my little toe hurts, and the like).

Both days this weekend however basically from half an hour before kickoff to half an hour after the full time whistle there were maybe 2 or 3 people in the waiting room at a time. The masses may have been sick, but not sick enough to miss out on watching the beloved footy.

Meanwhile two dozen doctors and nurses sat around getting paid to twiddle their thumbs for a couple of hours.

Then as soon as the game was over they started to show up again. In droves. Admitting that they had had their ailments while the game was on, but that they felt it could wait.

You feel like giving them a good piece of your mind (ie. a slap around the head) and pointing out that if it was that unimportant that it came second to football, then it was probably the kind of thing that was better being seen by their GP the next day, and that they were just wasting our time and the taxpayers’ money be being in ED with such trivialities.
The quiet irony which does the hint of a smile back into my heart is that the masses who showed up after the game finished probably ended up waiting 2-6 hours to be seen, due to their large numbers and minor conditions (people in ambulances automatically take higher priority when they arrive), whereas if they had showed up while the game was on they would probably have been seen almost instantly.

Junkies of the world lament

Today we had a number of very sick people come through ED.

As such we had been breaking out a fair amount of the good drugs which, in other times and other places, people would pay good money to get their hands on.

One guy was having a heart attack and we were giving him large quantities of morphine to control his pain.

Another lady was having intractible seizures, and again we were using fairly decent amounts of sedatives to stop her from fitting for long enough to stabilise her airway and CT scan her head.

And when all the excitement wore off, and things had settled down, I got to take all the unused morphine and valium and squirt it down the sink.

In my mind I could almost hear the cries of anguish from all the junkies of the world, and it amused me.

Fathers’ day

I was working overnight on the night before fathers’ day, and came home to find Simone asleep and Jack on the bed with a card in front of him.

Curious, I opened it, and found this: 1157

and inside was written this: 1159

My first fathers’ day card!

It was a lovely sentiment, and Jack sure has good handwriting given that he lacks opposible thumbs.

Geographic nomenclature

The other night I was musing with one of the other interns about the names of young patients we had been seeing, and the following question formed in my mind:

Why is it that there are so many kids around today (the parents of whom should have been given a good slapping) with names like Dakota (or Dakoda or Dekoda or…) or Montana, or Dallas?

Additionally why is it that Australian parent see fit to name after American geography, and yet you never see kids named Tasmania, or Adelaide, or Canberra? Canberra’s a nice name for a girl don’t you think?

:-s

The power of addiction

I have a problem.

I don’t sleep. I belay eating. I forgo important domestic and feline upkeep duties.

Instead, I stare fixedly as I impulsively watch episode after episode of the West Wing.

It’s starting to border on the ridiculous. It seems as though it is impossible to only watch one episode. As soon as one finishes I have to start the next one, until I have watched half a season in 2 days (while still managing to put in 10 hours work as well).
And the irritating thing is that with nothing else to do in Nambour, Simone is watching episodes even faster than I am, and so she is both ahead of me (which for reasons of general stupidity annoys my sense of competitiveness), and also keeps on buying new seasons, which means that this is only going to end when either I develop the will power to stop myself watching (and I think we all know that’s not likely to happen any time soon) or we reach the end of the series, in about 3 seasons time.

In the interim I don’t really need sleep do I…

Blog login

Recently I have been having a few search engines etc. reference material from my blog, and this has made me a little uncomfortable.

I tend to fairly free express my political and social opinions on my blog, and while I tend to rant I do so in a manner that I feel my readers (by which I mean family and friends) will understand.

Unfortunately the same implied understanding and tolerance cannot be reasonably extended to general members of the public who may stumble upon my blog, and I am aware of the risk of causing offence, or worse, having my privately expressed political or social opinions used against me at some point in the future.

In addition to this I have some photos of things like my Nephew and Niece (and presumably at some point in the future my own chiddlers) on the site, and while their parents are happy with me sharing those photos with my friends and family I think they may have issues (as I certainly do) with leaving this content accessable to everyone.

As such I am currently looking into methods to change the setup of my blog so that you have to register/login to read certain entries, and access certain photos/video. I will post more information as the project progresses.

In the interim if you are a regular reader you can already register as a user, and I can start setting things up so that you will be able to login when I get this up and running shortly.

If you have any questions drop me an email.

Sometime soon I will also write a Privacy Policy to satisfy those of you who are paranoid like me as to what info is needed for registration (just your email address basically) and what I will do with that information once it is submitted (keep it private, not use it for anything).

Physical activity

I read yesterday about a couple of cool things in the world of physics.

Firstly it appears that they may finally have observational evidence of the presence of dark matter. There is a really good explaination of the results and some of the background of the science here. It also contains links to the academic paper and the NASA press release. Given that this has been such a bone of contention in modern physics it’s nice to see it starting to pan out one way or another.

Secondly, an Irish company (those crazy crazy Irish) believes it has stumbled upon a way of producing “clean” energy from some system involving the interactions of magnetic fields. It’s a superb advance if it can be validated independently, although if that happens it will also confuse the hell out of a lot of people, because superficially at least it appears to violate the first law of thermodynamics (which states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, but can only be converted from one form to another). They have publically advertised for independent physicists to validate their system, and it will be interesting to see what the eventual outcome is.

Several Tales of Jack

Jack was running around the house this morning and he sounded like he was buzzing. I couldn’t figure it out. Every time he came close by I could swear that the buzzing got louder and sounded like it was coming from Jack. I was starting to get a little confused until he opened his mouth and the fly that had been in there flew out.

———

For some time now I have been at the mercy of a cruel and mischevious sock fairy. I bought some new socks a few weeks back, wore them a couple of times, and then one of them just disappeared. After looking high and low I put it down to an act of sock fairy. Every couple of days I would define insanity by doing the same thing again and again (ie looking for said lost sock) and expecting a different outcome from the last time I looked in a given spot. I had pretty much given up when one day I walked into the spare room to find Jack playing with said previously missing sock in the middle of the floor. Now I suppose that it is conceivable that the sock fairy returned the sock (which goes against his previous modus operandi), but it seems to me that the more likely explaination is that Jack in fact IS the sock fairy. Especially given his previously commented on fascination with socks.

In a discussion I had with Simone later on we were theorising that perhaps the sock fairy that we know as an indistinct etherial entity is in fact just the collaborative efforts of a number of cats acting in the roll of sock fairy. They all have slightly overlaping teritories, so the sock fairy acts upon everyone, and can be in multiple places simultaneously.

———

I don’t know if you all can remember the Simpsons episode where Marge gets a Pretzel making franchise. In her office in the garage she has this “inspirational” poster that she sticks up in front of her desk which shows a cat hainging onto a clothes line by it’s front paws and it’s head just looking out over the top of the line, with the phrase “Hang in there baby” across the bottom.

Now Jack has always been quite a jumper, and the other day I was reminded of Marge’s poster when jack tried to jump onto the top of the wardrobe in our bedroom. Now this wardrobe is probably 7 1/2 foot tall, and Jack was jumping from the top of the 3 foot high laundry basket. He jumped, got his paws onto the top, but didn’t have enough momentum to get the rest of him up, and there wasn’t enough traction for him to try and claw his way up the rest of the way (although he gave it a damn good try), so he just hung there for about 30 seconds. Eventually he decided to let go and drop back to the basket, and then slunk off to sit on the couch and ignore the indignity of me laughing at him. Sometimes he’s soooo cute.

Happy VD

(This is something of an extremely retrospective blog entry, given that the initial idea was laid down 6 months ago)

Today is St Valentine’s day, with all the corporately driven romantic BS that goes with it. Sure, I did some stuff to remind Simone that I really like her (a lot…) and that the only times I find our relationship frustrating are those times I can’t be with her, but I still was generally sceptical about the whole “you should express your affections today because Hallmark say so” sentiment underlying it all (did you know that Japan has separate Valentine’s type days, one for men to give to women and vice versa?).

That aside, I think that the funniest part of the day was when Sarah, one of the ortho reg’s I’m currently working with, arrived and announced to everyone in earshot, “Good morning everyone, Happy VD”. Now of course we all got the double entendre and chortled accordingly. Just like VD, Valentines days was one of those things that you ended up having inflicted upon you when you fell in love, and were cursed with for the rest of your life, whether you were still in love or not. 🙂