car talk

I had to take my car in for some maintenance earlier this week. (Not the suburban kid hauler, I already took that one in a few months ago, this time it was the car that I usually drive to work, a 2005 Toyota Camry that we bought used about four years ago and which has been remarkably reliable since, despite the fact that I rear-ended it squarely with another car the very next morning after finally getting my driver's license.) I had a flat back tire after rolling over some kind of screw, and while one would think that changing out a flat tire and putting on a spare would be the end of it, apparently I still had to take the car in to get a real tire on (the spare is not a real tire? Why?), replacing the spare in my trunk, and getting the wheels realigned.

This is exactly what I told the car people to do, but for some reason they took the liberty of hooking my car up to the FREE 27 POINT DIAGNOSTIC ROBOT (note: I did not ask for the robot) and shortly thereafter came into the waiting room with the lugubrious mien of someone about to inform me that my car had rectal cancer. Because apparently my car also had a (something something) leak, which was important because the (something) fed water to cool the engine (something something), not to mention that the (something) was missing four (somethings) requiring the whole works to be replaced, not to mention that steering (something) was totally jacked up and in sum, my car was destined to explode into a thousand fiery pieces unless I shelled out $3,500 to get all that stuff fixed.

THREE THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED AMERICAN DOLLARS.

Leave aside the fact that I just came in to get my tire changed. Also leave aside the fact that we bought this car used (though in excellent shape), so the total of the repairs proposed was more than a third of the price we paid for the car itself. Finally, apologies for the totally hackneyed "girls don't know nothing about cars" routine that I am personifying here--lots of ladies know a lot of stuff about cars, including how to change their own flat tires, but please forgive my stereotypical hand-fluttering in the face of impending automotive maintenance because I really, really know nothing about cars, INCLUDING HOW TO DRIVE ONE until about four years ago.

The mechanic left me with the price quote in that I'll let you have a minute to compose yourself way, saying that if I wanted to get everything fixed I would probably need a loaner to drive home so he would go ahead and get that for me. (He then added, with a tone of infinite largesse, that the loaner would be provided to me free of charge.) After unfreezing myself, I went to chase after the guy, because given that I had detected absolutely no problems with the driving and reliability of the car aside from, you know, the flat tire for which I came in, so barring any immediate safety concerns I would at least like some time to look over the diagnostic report and get a quote from a second car repair company.

Ten minutes later, he returned with the loaner. I told him that I'd like to hold off on repairs until we could get a second opinion. He looked at me for a beat, then called to the back workshop, where I assume my car was being fed through an MRI. "Yeah, the customer wants to hold off on the repairs. Uh huh. Oh. Really? Wow. Did you already...oh. OK." He turned to me. "They already started working on it. They took the water pump off the (something something) already."

"Already? Can they...you know, put it back?" More phone conferrals. The mechanic then told me that they could indeed put it back, but that I was lucky because they hadn't taken the (something) off the (something) yet, because (something something) antifreeze everywhere!

"I would like my car back please."

Any hour later, it was returned to me, with the new tire, which was the only thing I wanted changed in the first place. The following morning, Joe took the car to a AAA down the street from us, where they hooked the car up to a FREE 36 POINT DIAGNOSTIC ROBOT--nine more points than the other robot!--and found very little wrong with the car at all. (Joe brought the service list and the quote from the first place so he would know what to ask them to check extra carefully.) They replaced some of the missing (something somethings--like some kind of a bolt) and swapped out another (something that was dirty), but in all the bill totalled $500, which, while still a lot for a car that I wasn't intending to have serviced at all, is a far cry from the $3,500 that I was originally quoted.

And now here's the question for you. How much of it was bad luck of the draw at that first car place, and how much of it do you think is the fact that I (know-nothing-about-cars lady) took the car in to the first place, and Joe (know-little-about-cars-but-looks-like-he-does man) took the car in to the second place? Unfortunate happenstance, opportunism, or a little of both?

(Aside re: the post title. I love NPR as much as the next PBS-pledge-drive-canvas-tote-lugging-to-the-farmer's-market liberal, but there are two shows that I could never, ever get behind despite the fact that everyone else loves them dearly. One is "Car Talk." Those braying Boston accents! Why not just sharpen a pencil in my ear? And the second is "A Prairie Home Companion." Not only is it aggressively folksy, but it actually isn't funny at all, and you get the sense that the people in the audience will just laugh at anything just to show each other how cultured and good-humored they are. Bah!)

warning

I've got to say, once I finally figured out how to make a mouse-over image change (and granted, it wasn't that hard to do but you'd never be able to tell from how long it took me to figure out how to get it right), I just want to make a mouse-over image change for everything.  EVERYTHING.

But I guess I'll just quit while I'm ahead.

yersinia pestis, redux

This is what I'm supposed to be working on right now: the slides for my grand rounds on perioperative antibiotics.  Only I can't do that right now, because I'm super-busy looking at listings of taxidermied squirrels on eBay.  LIKE, REALLY BUSY.

It is fabulous.

Oh, hello there.  And to you too, with the mohawk, over there in the boot.

The artist captured the look of grim determination in this squirrel riding the rabbit quite well, don't you think?  Look at the set of his little jaw.

I think this squirrel in the rocking chair is supposed to be leisurely crossing his legs, only squirrels legs don't do that, so instead it just looks like he's flashing his junk.

So you can see that while I would like to be making more slides about beta-lactam rings and the dosing schedules of fluoroquinolones, but...well, there's just so much John Rambo/squirrel hybrid fanfiction to write.

(As you were.)

one of our own

I got this e-mail today from the chairman of the Emergency Department of St. Joseph's Hospital where I work, and which I will share here, lightly edited for privacy purposes.

Dear Colleague:

On July 4th, after working the night shift in the Emergency Department, Dr. D.G. had a right ventricular hemorrhage with subcortical ischemic changes. He is currently in [the medical ICU] awaiting transfer to [a prominent local rehab center].

Mrs. G was recently informed that D’s insurance does not include benefits for inpatient rehabilitative services. This news follows a difficult financial year for the G family; D has also been supporting his brother’s family due to metastatic disease as a result of stomach cancer. His brother died three months ago.

Because D is now considered uninsured, [the rehab center] is requiring $60,000 prior to D’s transfer. We have requested donations from numerous sources including Saint Joseph’s Mercy Foundation, but no one source has the availability of the entire amount.

We would like to ask for your help in the form of a donation as soon as possible. The sooner D can begin rehabilitation the better chance he has for a positive outcome.

I talked about this a bit in an entry a few weeks ago, but again, when you're working in a hospital with sick people every day, mortality is all at once distant and immediate.  Morbidity and human frailty are all around us, but at the same time, the very fact of its constancy makes it fade into the background.  It's just the scene that you're in, but seemingly, it's never you.

But it could be.  It could be you.  It could be me.  It could be your co-worker, your friends, you family.  I've met this doctor several times (the Emergency Department and the Anesthesia Department, as you can imagine, have more than just a glancing interface) and this doctor is not old, maybe just ten years older than I.  The day of his stroke, he wasn't feeling well.  But he came in to do his job anyway.  See the letter above: "...after working the night shift in the Emergency Department..."  He came in to do his job anyway.  Maybe he shouldn't have, but was the job he was trained to do, the duty he was called on to provide, which was to take care of sick people.

Now let's help take care of him.

Here's how.

(I apologize that this is so cumbersome as I'm not the one who set this up, but I'm told you're to click "Donate Online" --> "General Donation" --> "Other Fund" --> "Physicians in Need of Medical Care" and help however you can.  And please pass this link around to anyone who you think may be interested.)

Thanks everyone.  And have a good weekend.

padded

Oh man, so many good ideas from that last entry!  So many that I'm actually going to quit my job now and just work the kindergarden circuit, teaching cooking.  SUCKS TO YOUR ASSMAR, MEDICAL SCHOOL EDUCATION.  No, not really.  (But maybe.)

Anyway, I haven't decided on the final project (will take a little more research and following some of the links you guys posted), but needless to say I will share the plans when the time comes, and there will be pictures.  Because pictures are helpful, and also (pro tip!) make the entry seem longer.

Coincidentally...here are some pictures!

At dinner tonight.  We went to a place called Sweet Tomatoes, which is apparently some kind of all-you-can-eat soup and salad chain.  I'd never eaten there until about two weeks ago, but our realtor took us there for lunch right before we went to the lawyers office on our closing day, and it fills the specific niche in our lives of being a casual but relatively healthy restaurant with a lot of choices for the kids.  Also, did I mention that Cal ate for $3.00 and Mack got to eat for free?  And each of them ate more than I did?  Socking it to the man!

This picture, by the way, is to emphasize how much Mack and Joe look alike. Oy, those foreheads!

Secondly, this from the front of an envelope of a letter that Cal wrote one of his friends from school, and which he instructed us to drop into the postal box ASAP.

"For you male man."

I don't know why I think this is so funny but IT JUST IS.

Hope you're having a good weekend. And again, thank you so much for all your great suggestions in the last entry.  At some point I'm going to go back and write them all down, because there's gold in them thar hills.

domicile

Joe and I both got guilted into buying a couple of boxes of Girl Scout cookies (I for one am a sucker for stammered unpunctuated soliloquies delivered by kids at my doorstep. Just this week, I donated money to the American Heart Association because some little pudgy kid rang my doorbell and compelled me to--who knows what he really did with the money, but he was cute anyway) and my most embarrassing moment this week was bellowing at Cooper to shut up and stop acting like such a manic every time the doorbell rang...only to find a Girl Scout standing on my welcome mat bearing the Lemon Chalets and Samoas we ordered a few weeks ago. She was wearing a kilt and everything. Probably she's going to report me to Animal Cruelty now. Probably she'll get a badge for it.

So anyway, among other things, this weekend we've been eating some cookies.

We also had a walkthrough at the new house, wherein the current owners (who by the way are super-sweet people, I almost wish they were staying nearby, so that they could watch over us like benevolent godparents) sort of gave us the Owners Guide to the place, what switch turns on what and what kind of filters go where, that kind of thing. The inside of the house is very nice--not that it doesn't need a little updating here and there, but we're in no rush to fill it up with stuff right away, because when you don't have a ton of extra money, that's how The Ikea Room happens. And not that I don't love Ikea (it's a love-hate thing; I'm sure Darren Aronofsky's next film is going to involve being trapped in the underground showroom warehouse of an Ikea on a Saturday morning while mirrored reflections taunt you) but there comes a time in every adult's life when they want a piece of furniture that they don't have to assemble with that little L-shaped thing.

To this end, we are doing a couple of things. One is that we are going to throw out a ton of crap before we move. We've been pretty successful in paring down the non-essentials given the past three moves we've made in the last three years (one a long-distance move, even), but this time, my goal is utter ruthlessness, divorced of sentimentality. Goodbye to you, weird wooden baby peg toy missing half its pegs! If we ever decide to have another baby, we can get him or her a new peg toy! Or better yet, no toys at all, as it will only make the baby weak and frivolous! I will be like Genghis Kahn, only for throwing stuff away, not, you know, conquest.

Secondly, I am employing the assistance of this nice internet lady. We haven't actually ever met, but I have been reading her blog forever, and in the past few years, she's started to branch out into interior design. So anyway, we've chatted, and she's going to help us out with some advice for one particularly troublesome room at the new place--troublesome in that not only is it highly trafficked (it's the family room) but also of all the rooms, it looks the most...tired. (That's a real estate euphemism for "excessively beige and from the 1980's." Also: "full of charm" really means "fascinating in its decrepitude.") Anyway, I'm really excited about this, both for the prospect of brightening up a family room which has so much unachieved potential, but also to work with someone whose design sense I've admired from afar for many, many years. There will be pictures of the house later, of course, before and after, that kind of thing, and it will be fun. But for now, just look at this picture of my fried eggs this morning, that I thought looked like a jellyfish.




Hope you had a good weekend.

use it if you don't want to stink

There's nothing that's more boring (and a more stereotypical "mommy blog" trope) than complaining about being sick and how your damn kids gave it to you, right? Yeah, that's what I thought. Behold, my restraint!

(Cough.)

I got this package in the mail at work the other day. Usually my mail at work consists of clear plastic-wrapped medical journals (which I unwrap...sometimes) and various hospital-robot generated admonitions to sign my charts. So to get an actual package was something of a curiosity. This was what was inside.




Soap. Like a gift? From a patient that I had taken care of?

"Maybe they're trying to tell you something," one of my anesthetists piped up, miming the miasma of my prodigious body odor.

"Shut up, KEN," I said to him. (His name is Ken. Hi Ken!) "Oh wait, there's a card in here."

Turns out the soap was not from a patient, rather from a woman who had been pointed in the direction of the blog by her daughter, a third-year medical student. The woman (meaning the mom, though I'm sure they both read it because IT IS DISGUSTING) had seen my recent blog entry about the rats who have been eating our soaps (plural--upon further investigation, they actually tore into four or five bars, going preferentially for the Dove Men's Deep Clean soap while eschewing the unscented bars) and decided to send along a few bars of her handmade herbal soaps. And I think that's very sweet, because we are definitely bulk price club soap buyers, we've never had soap this nice.

Of course, the very fact that they smell nice will probably make them irresistible to the rodentia, so I'm going to have to keep them somewhere safe, like in the fridge or something. Unless they can get into there too, opening the fridge with their little clammy paws, like Raptors. Blergh. I've mentioned we're hoping to move in a month and a half, right?

(Thanks for the soaps, Christine!)

my feelings on the matter




If you like to watch a bunch of guys making funny faces while pretending to be glittery mummies, then by all means, watch men's figure skating in the Olympics.

as seen on the MARTA during my afternoon commute





No words can appropriately communicate the sheer wrongness of these shoes.

60 posts in 60 days, day 10: the heart, el corazon



A Post-it note I found on the sidewalk out in front of the hospital.

almost makes my eyes hurt

Ridiculously neon pink flowers growing outside the hospital.

wash me

I know I need to stop taking pictures of things coated in pollen, but oh my god, now people are WRITING in it.

I said it once before, but it still bears repeating: Gah!

yellow rain

Pollen in the sidewalk cracks. Gah!

because this one was a little too long for a twitter post

Today, one of the surgeons I was working with, apropos of nothing (or perhaps in response to some ad on the radio that I didn't hear), asked, "Is the winner of that show 'The Biggest Loser' the fattest person, or the person who loses the most weight?" We all told him that it was, in fact, the latter. Because even in America, we have yet to develop a reality show where you win just by virtue of being really really fat.

(Yet.)

the importance of labeling




Making sure my new pens don't walk off.

but at least now I know what to put in front of our door for next halloween




Dear ICU staff: the next time you leave out your somewhat-lifelike-from-a-distance ACLS training dummy on a stretcher in front of the unit, causing everyone passing by to stop and check whether of not some poor, neglected patient has been forgotten out in the hallway, please make sure that dummy has a less scary face.

I'm going to have nightmares for weeks.

like a kid in a crystal-cut glass saxophone store

What I wish they sold at the hospital gift shop:




What they actually sell at the hospital gift shop:

I suspect this overload of Precious Items may be because the only people that actually shop at the hospital gift shop are the elderly ladies who volunteer there. But...dude. Who ever heard of a hospital gift shop that doesn't sell bags of chips? How is anyone supposed to feel better around here without the healing power of Cheetos?

and then he started combing his hair with it like in "the little mermaid"

Hey look, I don't pretend to be Martha Stewart, OK? I can barely cook rice, and as for kitchen tools, the ones we actually use we keep to a minimum. Most of them are from this black plastic set that I think we picked up at Bed Bath and Beyond, that came in a bagged bundled set for, like five bucks. So it is very strange as well as very specific that one of my pet peeves is when people (translation: Joe) use(s) kitchen implements for the wrong purpose. Inexplicably drives me INSANE. And the brunt of the transgressions centers on this one tool:



I don't know what this is, or what it's called, but to my mind, the shape and configuration implies that it is a tool used to pick up and serve pasta of the spaghetti/linguini variety. I mean...right? It has little prongs to entwine the strands and everything. It's a long pasta picker-upper, and due to its unusual shape, that seems like basically the only thing it's suited to do.

However, Joe uses this implement for EVERYTHING. Which is annoying not just because it's difficult to clean, but, see above, using kitchen implements incorrectly drives me crazy, despite the fact that I have no actual proof that pasta-picking is what this implement is actually used for. But people, seriously? HE USES THIS FOR EVERYTHING. Including and not limited to:

• Scooping up rice
• Serving beef stew
• Dishing out soup

I mean, really? SOUP? When it's sitting next to two ladles and a giant serving spoon? And, more saliently, THERE'S A HOLE IN THE MIDDLE OF THAT THING. I mean, Jesus.

and "cytokine cascade" was found in the dishwashing detergent aisle




(E-mailed to me by Joe, who was at Home Depot purchasing Drano for our clogged toilet.)

what, no nejm?

Some of the magazines strewn out at the neighborhood inflatable playground, ostensibly giving you something to read while your kid bounces his brains out.



Pretty standard assortment, but I have to say the JAMA caught me by surprise.