Thursday, December 20, 2007

the hot zone

Man, that pig generated more comments than the preschool thing! To those made uncomfortable by our party foodstuffs, I offer two things. One, this cute bunny! (image credit)




Two, this piece of advice: do not go to Chinatown. Seriously. There are things that you will see in those restaurants and butcher windows that will make you unhappy. Delicious things.

But anyway, I guess in some sense I was lucky to be on call last night, because there was so much food left over from the party that I didn't even have to worry about dinner. The roast beast had long since been reduced to shreds, but there was still some chicken and tortilla chips and salsa, stuff like that. There were also two gigantic tubs of pasta salad sort of sitting there looking contemplative, but after some thought I steered clear, because I was a little suspicous of something with high mayonnaise content sitting out at room temperature for eight hours. Heaven forbid I get food poisoning and then have to deal with some emergency.

The thing that made it a little less than ideal to be on call yesterday was that Cal's been a little sick lately. Nothing major, just a lot of congestion and coughing. A text message exchange between me and Joe last night, while I was in the OR.


JOE
Cal has a fever, 99.1 axillary, and slapped cheeks. So, parvo it is.

MICHELLE
OK. How's he feeling?

JOE
Fine. Gave him some Tylenol mixed with juice.

MICHELLE
He's about 15 kilos, so...(tapping on calculator) let's say 7 ccs?*

JOE
I gave him 5 ccs.

MICHELLE
Lowballer.

JOE
He feels fine.

MICHELLE
Good. Oh, and stop slapping our son's cheeks.


This morning, I'm not completely convinced that Cal does indeed have parvo, since he has no rash on his body that I can see, but it hardly matters, since there's nothing different that I'm going to do about it anyway.

* No matter how many years may have passed since my days as a Pediatric resident, I cannot stop reflexively calculating oral Tylenol and Motrin dosages. It's like a tic.

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