Winter has Arrived

This morning, I woke up at 4:45, to complete silence. As any Canadian knows, there is no silence like that of a snowfall, so instantly I knew that there was a blanket of snow on the ground outside. When I looked out the window, I was greeted by about three inches of snow. June is in a week, and I still need to get the snow off my car before I head out to the hospital.

Anyways, I was gonna say a bit about my 24 hours of trauma call last weekend. It was pretty crazy. There were some car crashes, a couple of stabbings, etc. But, the big shocker for me was the number of ATV/quad injuries, who made up the majority of cases. In terms of long-term problems, I think that it will probably the quad riders that will end up in the most trouble; those things are dangerous, holy cow.

Good to see, though, how the whole system works. The city has a few good people standing at the ready to save our lives, 24/7.

Well, I got about 30 minutes of sleep during my shift. I was pretty much shot when I got out the door late in the morning on Victoria Day. Oh, it was snowing then too...

Keep Your Pants On

I just finished my week of urology. Now, it's the Victoria Day long weekend, but unfortunately, I have to do 24 hours of trauma call starting on Sunday at 8 a.m., so my weekend is shot. Tuesday, gen surg begins in the northeast.

I have one little story from the past week. On Wednesday afternoon, I was following my doc for an afternoon of cystoscopy. That's looking inside peoples' bladders with a scope, in case you're wondering. Well, for one patient, we had to use fluoroscopy, so we had to get on our lead aprons. My lead was different from the ones I have become used to for OR work; it closed at the front, with big velcro strips. After we were done, the doc started writing his notes, and the nurses and radiation tech were talking to the patient. I began to remove my lead. Riiiiiipppp, I pulled open the velcro. Unfortunately, the waistband on my scrubs had adhered to the velcro, so zooop, my pants fell down.

Pretty embarrassing. I'm not sure if anyone actually saw, since I was pretty speedy at getting them back up again. However, I can hardly believe that all of the five other people in the room failed to notice me standing there in my underwear...

Very inappropriate behaviour for a med student.

Face Time

Facebook use has exploded around here. Everyone is doing it. On Monday, I started in urology in a new hospital, a bit more laid back than Foothills. During one of the cases, I looked over to see what the anaesthesiologist was doing so intently; she was facebooking. Walked past the fluoroscopy control nook; the x-ray tech was facebooking.

The only two hold-outs I know of are Magic Pants and Vibe. How do they resist the peer pressure?

Speaking of Magic Pants, I think I've mentioned that we both owned the same crappy phone, a Motorola V220. The worst phone of my life. His phone was crapping out in the same way as mine, with the phone hanging up when you answer it. That's the opposite of what a phone is supposed to do, Motorola; you may want to look into removing that instant-hang up function. Anyways, things reached the breaking point for me on Saturday, when I had a phone conversation with Rococo consisting of about a dozen ten-second individual calls, with the phone crapping out each time.

So, on Sunday, I picked up a W180i. It's good to have a Sony Ericsson again; I feel alive once more.

Geysers

I think I've been sprayed with more human blood in the past week, than in my entire life up to this point...