the underwear drawer

kleptomania

I notice that every day, I keep bringing little pieces of the hospital home with me. Literally. I don't mean to do it, I think I just stuff things into my pockets to make things more convenient, so I don't have to keep running back and forth to the supply closet or the med cart, but inevitably I forget to empty my pockets and I end up accumulating all this stuff at home when I empty my clothes. Today I seem to have pinched a bottle of albuterol and several bullets of nebulizer-ready saline. Usually in the ER, I end up stealing piles of tongue blades or ear wax curettes. Wihle on the wards, I come home with pockets full of butterflies, IVs, and paper tape. And on every rotation, I seem to accumulate more and more single-wipe alcohol pads, until the pile threatens to consume my entire apartment. I'm not trying to be a thief, the hospital can have its stupid stuff back. I just always seem to forget that I'm a walking supply closet until I've walked right out of the building.

As anticipated, it was a busy day at clinic. I think I saw something like 21 walk-ins, and since there were no other residents at clinic today, they gave me two exam rooms to work out of. I like having a constant flow of patients between multiple exam rooms, it makes me feel rather efficient and bustling. I only wish that it worked more like a private Peds office, where the staff up front could actually help triage a little more, or anticipate some diagnostics so that they could be done by the time the patient hits my room. Or, barring that, it would be nice to have a complete set of vitals once in a while. But I realize that asking for more efficiency in running an academic practice is a little like asking Gilbert Gottfried to lower his voice. It's just not ever going to happen. So I guess I'll just get my own vitals.

Today I made the world's greatest fruit salad. Actually, it's so good, it deserves all caps, THE WORLD'S GREATEST FRUIT SALAD. The reason it's THE WORLD'S GREATEST is that I cut out all the crap filler fruits. Out were the rind-pieces of honeydew, the unripe cantoloupe, the cardboard-tasting blueberries. This FRUIT SALAD is truly THE WORLD'S GREATEST because I only included fruits that I liked, in reasonable proportions. Behold, it contained:

• Kiwi (cut the correct way, into thick slices, not wedges)
• Strawberrues (cut the correct way, into thick wedges, not slices)
• Pineapple (pre-cut, because I don't have a machete)
• Papaya (pre-cut, because who wants to deal with all those little rabbit poo-like seeds)
• Raspberries (they were "golden" raspberries, which I'd never seen before--yellow!)

I was going to throw in some mandarin orange slices too, thereby making it THE WORLD'S GREATEST ASIAN FRUIT SALAD (for as we know, anything with mandarin orange slices becomes instantly "Asian," like the Asian chicken salad at Wendy's) but then I thought that might be cheating, since the orange slices are marinated in syrup. But I can't eat citrus that has any white pith on it. Either I have to peel off all the white stuff, or I have to eat it all artificially prepared for me in the form of mandarin orange slices or the like. I trace this fiber aversion to my early childhood, when my dad would make me eat the white parts of the orange even after I I spit them out. Which, as you can imagine, was fairly traumatic, not to mention disgusting.

Currently reading: "The Kiss." I remember this book made a big splash when it came out, probably due to its taboo subject matter. But it's reasonably well written too, and I'm enjoying it well enough so far. But I guess the moral of the story is: don't let your estranged mentally disturbed father slip you the tongue.