your self-esteem boost for the weekend

When we first moved into this house, we noted that the previous owners had added a few design flourishes which were a little bit, shall we say, rococo for our tastes. Some of them came down immediately--the full wall mirrors in several areas, the gold-painted mirror flanked by a roulade and cherub motif in the half bathroom. But some of the others, like the gold (colored) doorknobs on the French doors throughout, while not quite my taste, seemed innocuous and certainly functional enough.

Seemed.

The problem with these doorknobs, I've found, is that I keep getting hooked on them. Not anyone else, just me. Everyone else in this house is either tall enough or short enough to avoid this particular problem, but at my height (5'2" and a half--and if you don't think that half inch is important, you much be much taller than 5'2") these doorknobs all over the house are right at waist height. Belt loop height, to be exact. I keep getting hooked on these doorknobs. And you would think that it's easy enough to unloop oneself, but look at that doorknob a little closer. The loop is a little bit spiralled, like a nautilus. Like one of those barbed fishooks. And once you get hooked, it's actually unusually difficult to extricate yourself.

Yesterday, I went to Costco to do some grocery shopping. We had a nice time in Orlando, but when we came home the food situation in the larder was a little bare-bones, and breakfast that morning was somewhat thin, which inexplicably panicked the kids. (Under normal circumstances I don't think they'd have any trouble with a breakfast of cereal and milk, but the fact that that's all there was to eat suddenly had them eyeing the USDA food pyramid and acting like we were the Joads in Dust Bowl Americana or some such thing.)  So anyway, I went to Costco and stocked up on, whatever, a coffin-sized flat of strawberries, cinder-block sized bricks of cold cuts, the like--and headed back to the house to stick the perishables in the fridge before heading out again to pick up the kids from school.

Only, as usual, I got hooked on the doorknob. One of my back belt loops. And I had turned the home security alarm on before I'd left for the store, so now that was counting down the 40 seconds or however much time I had to punch in my code until the alarm went off. I calmly laid down my drum of peanut butter and body-bag-sized sack of raisins and went about calmly disentangling myself, only to grow increasingly less calm as the second continued to tick by and I was still caught on the spiral of the doorknob hook. Looking at it straight on, it seems like it should be easy enough, but looking at it from above and behind, for some reason I couldn't get my belt loop out.

The forty seconds elapsed, and now the external security alarm started to go off with a loud whoop whoop whoop sound which, in theory, would bring the police (or at the very least, a local citizen militia) running to help defend the old homestead. I began to panic. I had to turn off that alarm, but the security pad was at least ten feet away on the far wall of the kitchen. Plan A, the straightforward plan, was not working, so I thought: my pants. If I can't get my pants out of the doorknob, I had to take off my pants instead.

So I took off my shoes. I undid my top pants button and unzipped the fly. As I started to shimmy out of my pants it occurred to me that if someone did show up to investigate the alarm, what they'd find would be a pair of beige corduroys hanging from my kitchen door, and me, pantsless, standing in a scattered pile of bulk pistachio nuts, BUT NEVER MIND ABOUT THAT NOW, JUST TURN OFF THE ALARM, DUMBASS.

It took a little while longer to realize that it's actually pretty difficult to take off your pants if you can't pull your pants down--the pants were still hooked on the doorknob at waist-level, remember--when suddenly, I was free.  Free!  I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS, FUCKERS!  What happened eventually was that the beltloop broke. Thank you, Gap Incorporated, for your shoddy tailoring. I hurriedly punched in the security code, stopped the alarm, and waited for the security company to call and make sure that I was OK, just like in all those commercials where the dark-clothed, stocking capped burglar (in broad daylight, like, nice camoflage job, guy) inexplicably tries to break into that house in where the mom and her daughter are baking cookies or whatnot else wholesome and good.

The security company never checked in, by the way. And while, yes, there was no real emergency, it was just me, my pants, and an over-designed doorknob, for all they know, I COULD BE DEAD. Whether it's a good thing or a bad thing that no one in this densely populated neighborhood came around to witness my shame, I can't quite decide yet.

regular law-breaker

Ira Glass and I agree on one thing--well, probably more than one thing, but this thing in particular--that the best place to listen to a radio show (or podcast) is in the car while you're driving. This is a somewhat new development for me, as anything related to driving is; most of you are probably aware that I got my first driver's license a little more than a year ago (October 19th, 2009, to be absolutely precise, after failing the road test once the month prior) and while I am somewhat more comfortable driving now than I was then, I still would not classify myself as a good driver. I am probably a better driver than your average teenage hotrod, but it's the very thing that makes me a better driving--that is to say, a surfeit of caution--that also makes me a worse driver. Anyway, I always try to be very careful. I signal my turns even in empty parking lots. I never pick up my phone while in the car, or else I pull over before answering. I have a GPS in the car that I have programmed to avoid all highways, giving me the directions from Point A to Point B only via local roads. When I see other people driving like fucktards (which is basically every fifth car), I tsk tsk them in rue.

But I do like to listen to podcasts in the car.

It wasn't that long ago that I couldn't listen to anything in the car, because so much of my concentration was focused on the actual task of driving. No music. No conversation. I dreaded having the kids in the car with me, not only because of that fear of having all my eggs in one basket (that basket being the car), but because no matter how much I explained that they had to shush, Mommy was driving, she had to concentrate, the endless monologue and stream of questions from the backseat only increased in volume.

However, I've been driving for a while now, and 95% of my driving takes a well-worn circuit between home, work, and, on occasion, Cal's school, so I'm a little more comfortable with the act of driving, at least along these routes. When I'm going somewhere new, the old rules apply (no radio, no music, no talking) but on routine drives, I will listen to a podcast or two, or occasionally sing along to music. Singing and driving at the same time! Who knew this day would ever come.

Anyway, I used to plug my iPod into the auxiliary input port of the car so that the podcasts could play through the actual car speakers, but for some reason, this stopped working, and then subsequently, I lost the auxiliary cable hookup anyway. So then I was putting my iPod on the dashboard and playing it through the actual iPod speakers, but I don't have to tell you how this turned out--tinny, muffled, and I could barely hear anything anyone was saying. So, as a final solution, I plugged in my earphones and put one earbud in my ear for the drive. The other ear was free to, you know, receive ambient sound. I did have a vague notion that this was probably not the safest thing (you know, having something in your ear while operating a car) but I rationalized that it wasn't any different than having a Bluetooth earset for hands-free phone answering, which I'm pretty sure is allowed, if holding the actual phone up to your ear while driving is not.

Anyway, I was driving home in this fashion the other day (carefully, on the right side of the street, at the speed limit) when I pulled up alongside a police car, which had stopped, waiting to turn into a gas station. We passed by in slow motion. I looked at him. He looked at me. I passed on by. He made a U-turn. The next thing I know, I saw flashing blue lights in my rearview, which I'm pretty sure is some kind of indication that you're in the deep end of the shit pool.

"Is something the matter, officer?" I asked all politely, knowing already what this was going to be about. He asked me for my license and told me that he saw that I was driving with headphones on--did I know that wasn't allowed? I said that I didn't realize that (though it made perfect sense), but that I'd only had one earbud in. Then I forced myself to stop talking, because what did I think I was going to gain from making excuses to a police officer? Just smile and nod, dumbass!

The police officer (who was very nice, by the way, and had a very charming Irish accent, like a cop out of a damn movie about the 1950's) then stopped, and asked me, "What kind of work do you do?"

"I'm a doctor."

He looked at my scrubs and nodded. "Next time, don't drive with earphones." And then he let me go without a ticket. I'm not sure me telling him what I did had anything to do with him deciding to let me go without a citation, but I guess I'll never really know, even though that's not going to stop me for feeling vaguely guilty about that possibility.

And no, I'm not going to drive with earphones anymore. In either ear.

smiling for the camera is not one of my strong points

So now that Cal has had his name in lights--or at the very least in microscopic all caps print--I wanted to get some slightly higher quality photos for the book jacket and any promotional materials that might be required. Nothing at all against the photos that Cal took, because they were pretty good especially given the lack of photogenicity of his subject, but I didn't give him anything good to work with; all the pictures were taken with a cell phone camera and the resulting product is a little grainy.

Anyway, after looking around online, I found a portrait photographer whose look I thought fit the bill. His name is Stan Kaady, and he is a portrait photographer with editorial experience who seemed to have a very natural and relaxed portraiture style, with fine and judicious use of light and color. I had a portrait taken about a year ago for our corporate website (the less you know about this photo the better--not the worst picture of me ever, but very close) and it was all about studio lighting and unnatural poses and sitting in front of a mottled brown backdrop. Most of my co-workers looked pretty good (and frankly doctor-y) in this setting, but I don't photograph well even under the most spontaneous of circumstances, so this kind of posed-indoors-under-floodlights-in-front-of-a-roll-of-contact-paper did not do anything for me, and I think that the resulting photo clearly belies this tight-lipped dead-eyed horror that I was clearly emanating.

Oh, OK, I'll show it:




I know, who farted, right?

(Again, no aspersions cast on this particular photographer, she was just doing the best she could with a terrible photo subject under the most canned possible conditions. I just knew that this was not going to work for me again, so when looking for someone to take a new picture of me, I wanted to find someone who would not replicate the same scenario. I also wanted to find someone who would let me go outside. I JUST WANT TO LIVE.)

Stan was super-flexible from the get-go, from the day to the time of the shoot (he likes to shoot in the afternoon, which worked for me--the light was really nice that time of day as well). He asked me what kind of feel I wanted for the shoot, and I told him that I wanted kind of an gritty look, with sort of an urban decay motif though perhaps falling just short of outright decrepitude. So we picked a neighborhood, and earlier in the day Stan and his assistant scouted out some nice locations in the nooks and crannies. And if I do say so myself, I think the photos are going to turn out really, really nicely. Even though I'm in them.






These are not his photos, by the way, they're my photos from my iPhone. I just wanted to give a sense of the backdrops. Anyway, Stan and his assistant Chris were really wonderful and professional and available for commissioned portrait work in the Atlanta area. If you're looking for some nice photos of yourself or your loved ones--maybe even in time for the holidays?--it's worth checking out his website or giving him a call.




I'll have some proofs by Monday, I think, at which point I'll post a few up and we can all vote on which one we should pick to send in to my editor. (Hi, Emily!) Sound good? If not, too freaking bad, I am compelling you to vote. It can be like "America's Next Top Model," and you can rule out any pictures in which I look amputated or insufficiently like a broken-down doll.

ideal tenents

Well, that was a good discussion. We are a good bunch up in here.

So, I'm doing some studying for the Oral Boards, mostly boning up on areas that I don't really do every day anymore, like Peds, OB, and complex intracranial neurosurgical anesthesia. I am remembering a lot of things that I have blissfully forgotten. Like the many hours I spent holed up in those dark neurosurgical ORs dripping CSF out into a little baggie in an attempt to "loosen" the brain for my neurosurgical colleagues while they were digging around. And the delightful phenomenon of uterine inversion, in which the postpartum uterus actually turns itself inside out and pokes out the vagina. Ah, residency. Those were good times.

Anyway...

So you know that we just moved in October into a house that we are renting from some nice folks (see: Southernism!) who had to move up to Philadelphia before they were able to sell the place. The house is a little old, and probably not the most enviro-friendly of dwellings (windows not weatherproofed, no low-flow toilets or showerheads) which makes it somewhat expensive from a utilities point of view, but it's a great neighborhood and close to Cal's school and easy for Joe to get to work and blah blah blah boring talk. Anyway, we have a one-year lease at this house, which seems kind of like a long time when you're a student, but for me just makes me think that there's barely any point of unpacking because what's the point, we're just going to move again in a few months anyway. Which is mostly fine, since we don't mind living among the boxes and we never have people over anyway (30% due to embarrassment, 70% due to anti-social tendencies). Anyway, the boxes are great for covering up all the outlets that Mack finds inexplicably fascinating and for building various child-proofing barricades, like in Les Miserable. (Primary intent of the barricade in Les Mis: defiant show of uprising! Secondary intent: to keep Gavroche out of the computer room.)

So I was fine with us living like shantytown people and had frankly stopped noticing the boxes, but then our landlords were in town this past weekend and wanted to come by and check out the basement, as there had been some flooding a few months ago and they wanted to survey the damage. They didn't give us very much notice, so I spent the better half of Saturday afternoon cleaning what I could and shoving what else I couldn't clean into a variety of unlikely to be opened closets. But there was nothing that I could do about this:




All our Christmas decorations are still up. Yes, all of them. Tree, stockings. The lights are even still hanging in the windows. And I'm sure I didn't need to point out to you that Saturday was the first day of spring. Awkward!

Anyway, after some uncomfortable silence in which the owners pretended not to notice or were decided whether or not to say anything, I cheerfully told them that since it was almost Easter, we just decided to leave up the decoration from Jesus' first birthday party and celebrate clear through April. I think they bought it.

how many times can i say the word bike in this entry? (lots of times.)

So now that Cal can ride a two-wheeler (mostly) without falling over, and Joe passed his stress test with flying colors (see: the myocarditis scare of 2009), we decided that we should all get bikes! And we can be the family that bikes together! On bikes! Also...BIKES!

This is the bike that I ordered:

I was going to get an old bike off Craig's List but then I noticed that this bike was basically the same price and also I didn't have to go pick it up at someone's house, which seems like a good way to get shanked. It is a very basic bike--I think it's only one speed, and it has a foot break instead of a hand break which basically means that it's for oldsters riding along the boardwalk in olden days Coney Island--but I do not need a fancy bike, as my ability to ride a bike is marginal anyway.

SOMEWHAT RELATED STORY FROM THE PAST: Joe and I went to Hawaii, oh, about nine months before Cal was born (ahem), and one of the activities we signed up for on this trip was a downhill bike ride down Waimea Canyon. It was a ridiculously easy ride, since they actually drove us up to the top of the mountain--we only had to bike downhill, which means that you barely had to pedal at all. But still, there was a minimal bike skills competency screening, meaning the morning of the bike tour you had to show up at the tour place and prove to the guides that you could bike in a circle around the parking lot without falling over. I barely made it through this screening process. They made me take one more circuit around the lot than everyone else because I was wobbling so much all over the place and they made sure as hell that I signed that release stipulating that I wouldn't sue them if I died. But anyway, spoiler alert...I lived! No, that's not just my reanimated corpse administering anesthesia to your grandfather by day and searching for tasty human brains at night! And the bikes they provided us for this downhill canyon tour were almost identical to the one I just bought, which I guess doesn't really prove much of anything expect maybe that it's the cheapest non-child bike on the market.

Anyway, that's my bike. Joe got a somewhat nicer bike, partially because he actually cares about the bike that he's riding and also partially because he's going to be the one with the baby seat strapped to the back, so there's slightly more invested in his choice of carriage and the fact that it will not fall apart. But who knows, maybe by this weekend (depending on how fast they arrive and how fast Joe can assemble them--the latter of which will probably be the rate-limiting step) we may be biking through the park en famille like that "Do Re Mi" number in The Sound of Music. Only in this version Maria loses control and runs over Mother Superior, who is not amused.

less of a style statement than a stupidity statement

I've been getting a lot of compliments at work lately about my watch, which is newish--I got it about two months ago, right around the end of my maternity leave. But whenever someone gives me a compliment--and not just about this watch, about anything, ever--I give them too much information. So first, I have to tell people, DUDE, TOTAL STEAL, IT WAS ONLY NINE DOLLARS!!!, both to convey (perhaps out of embarrassment in being complimented) that it was a bargain and therefore OK; that I am not the kind of person who spends a lot of money on accessories, even of the functional variety; and that despite the fact that I am 30 years old, I still shop at Forever 21, home of the one-time-wear disposable outfit.

OK, so there's that. And then the next thing I feel that I must tell people about this watch is that I got it to replace my old watch, which was a similarly cheap watch (a $9.99 digital watch that I got out of a spinning plastic case at Walgreens), not because my old watch broke, but because I couldn't figure out what configurations of buttons to push to set it back one hour for Daylight Savings Time (in the FALL, which was, like, FOUR MONTHS AGO) and I got so sick of subtracting one hour every time I looked at my watch that I just decided to go old school and get an analog watch. An old fashioned watch with an old fashioned dial that you could twist to set the clock back one hour. Only now we just changed for Daylight Saving's again, and now my original digital watch would have gone back to being correct, only in my attempts to set the time back one hour, I somehow irrevocably screwed it up, and now it thinks it's, like, twenty-seven o'clock in the morning. So I cannot be trusted around digital watches. But now watch me take care of patients undergoing open-heart surgery!

This is what I mean by too much information.

snakes on a drain

As I had sort of implied with that earlier post, we have been having some problems with our downstairs toilet. (How weird, to have a "downstairs toilet." How weird to have stairs. Anyway.) Nothing broke per se, the toilet's not overflowing, there's no leak, the toilet just won't flush. I don't know if its a function of water pressure or too much toilet paper or someone's formidable and apparently capacious bowels, but it has been clogged for several days, defying attempts at clearance ranging from flushing again to plunging to The Old Coathanger Trick to being chemically challenged with Drano. At some point, we sort of called the code and Joe suggested that maybe we needed to call a plumber to snake the toilet.

"No!" I insisted, jiggling the coathanger into the toilet's murky depths, "It's fine! Just flush it again!"

Anyway, I called a plumber.

First, I called our building management as a courtesy to ask if there was a preferred plumber that they wanted us to use. However, as with every other occasion that I have called building management for any kind of problem (see also: SILENT BUT DEADLY, when we thought we were being killed by a gas leak from our fireplace), my call went directly to voicemail. Fine, I tried. So I looked online (apparently there is this very informative and useful site called Google.com! Write it down! I'm saying that as a joke but my mom actually e-mailed me once with a note to that very effect--e-mailed it, in fact, to my Gmail account) and found some plumber in our neighborhood that was called something enticing like, "Budget Plumber" or "Affordable Plumber" or whatever, something implying that they were cheap. So I called the economy plumber and explained the problem, asking them if I could make an appointment for them to come by tomorrow. Oh, and by the way, barring any unforseen complexities (a bezoar of toilet paper the size of China, perhaps), how much did they estimate it might cost to clear the blockage?

There was some rustling as the lady looked for her price list. "Well, if it's a simple [hmmm], and there's no [hmmm] to the main [hmmm], as long as the [hmmm] is confined to the [hmmm]..."

(Fifteen minutes of plumbing talk later, she said that it could be around $135.)

A HUNDRED THIRTY FIVE DOLLARS FOR YOUR EXTRA-LONG COAT HANGER POKING? I felt like I was going to have a stroke. But what can you do? It's like calling a consult at the hospital. Sometimes you don't want to go through all the trouble, and it's not anything you couldn't do yourself, but what are you going to do? You need the experts and their special toys. So anyway, they told me that the plumber would be by the next day, between 10am and 2pm (note the convenient and small time frame--that won't fuck up your plans for the day) and hung up.

About an hour later, I got a call back from building management. "Hey, got your message, and yeah, there is a plumber that we like to use who does a lot of work in the building. It's called Super Duper Plumbing [or whatever, I can't remember], here's their number. If you can, be sure to ask for Eric."

"Super Duper. Eric. Got it."

"ERIC!" the building manager repeated, somewhat frantically. She had a real boner for Eric, evidently.

Now, let me ask you this. If your management company has a SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP with a specific plumbing company, if they throw all their business towards this one group, wouldn't you expect that reciprocally, some sort of special discount should be applied for residents of this housing complex? I mean, that's just my understanding of how the world works. You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. You snake my toilet, I'll...flush yours. I don't know. Stay with me here. I called Super Duper Plumbing, made an appointment, asking for ERIC (they tried to give me Steve instead but I said no way, Corky) and then called back the economy plumber to cancel.

However, after canceling with the first plumber, it occurred to me that I never asked Super Duper Plumbing for an estimate. So I called back, they hemmed and hawed, and fifteen minutes of plumber talk later, they said that at bare minimum, it would probably cost $235.

TWO HUNDRED AND THIRTY FIVE AMERICAN DOLLARS TO SNAKE OUR TOILET. I mean, I know that these are troubled economic times and all, but I was under the impression that numbers still carried some meaning.

So then I cancelled my appointment with them too. And then I was going to call back the first plumber to re-set up the original appointment, but I was too embarrassed, like I had jilted them or something and now I was crawling back on my hands and knees begging them to clear the detritus of our human waste from our poor, pathetic downstairs half-bathroom.

And then Joe got home and asked if the toilet was fixed and I said, "Funny you should ask that," before telling him the whole story about the cheap plumbers and the building manager and Eric and TWO HUNDRED AND THIRTY FIVE DOLLARS!!! Which is why I cancelled their asses!

"TWO HUNDRED THIRTY FIVE DOLLARS?" Joe panicked, completely skipping over the cancelling part. "WE CAN'T AFFORD MANY MORE PROBLEMS LIKE THIS!" This is usually his cue to start his gloom and doom pre-tax season financial projection, which--OK, I know, alright? I know times are tight, and some expenses inopportune, but do you and CNN need to point out how it's the End of Days every single minute!? It's not like I'm over here stuffing fur stoles and hundred dollar bills into the toilet, causing it to clog! I DIDN'T EVEN WANT TO CALL A PLUMBER, WE HAVE TWO OTHER TOILETS THAT ARE WORKING PERFECTLY FINE, I JUST WANTED TO KEEP POKING AT THE TOILET WITH A STICK.

Anyway, we soon realized that while we probably are not qualified to handle the nuances of fixing, say, a cracked water main, or even necessarily a leaky faucet, the act of jamming something down a toilet to break up whatever unspeakable substances are clogging it does not amount to rocket science, and that they sell toilet snakes (or "augers," for you fancy folk out there) at Home Depot for, like, $30. And so...



And now, we can flush our toilet.

(And the point of my telling this story was...what? Hilarious domestic antics? Appreciation for the plumbing arts? The revelation that someone in our house may be taking prodigiously huge shits or using an unholy amount of toilet paper, possibly both? An attempt to sabotage any chance I may have of ever becoming Surgeon General? Take your pick.)

pinky dinky doo

So yesterday, out of curiosity, I looked up how much that laptop bag would have cost if one were to buy it new. $150. And they were selling it at the "antique store" (basically new, it still had all the factory-creases in it from not being used) for $20. And I thought to myself, well, I could use a bigger laptop bag. And maybe pink isn't that hideous? Humor me, please. We're into Barbie!



Thus underlining a key weakness of my character. Sometimes I will buy something not because I want or need it, but just because it's a good deal. See also: a dozen donuts.

brick prison in the news

Fairly amusing piece in The New York Times about kids cramming for the admissions exam to my old high school. Given how hard these kids are studying, I have a sneaking suspicion that if I had to take the test today, I wouldn't get in. (And I don't mean if the 10 year-old me took the exam. I mean even if the 30 year-old me took the exam.) Nonetheless, I feel privileged to have been schooled among such academic titans. I mean, just look at us. Clearly, we were geniuses.




Best line in the article? Though probably only hilarious to those of us to went to high school in New York City?

And what if they were not among the fewer than 200 students who gain seats out of a pool of up to 2,000 test-takers?

“I’ll be sad,” said James Lee, a student at Intermediate School 119 in Glendale, Queens, “but there’s still Stuyvesant.”

Heh.

* (OK, OK...I am the one at the top of the pyramid in the gigantic green T-shirt. I think we were in...eighth grade at the time? What, obscenely oversized isn't cool anymore? Wait...what do you mean, it wasn't ever cool? Thanks to Maria, whose Facebook page I ganked this off of.)

and then these bullies pushed me down and stepped on my glasses

Usually the streets are pretty empty when I walk to the subway station each morning, so it should have been OK when, as I was crossing the street, my cell phone case slipped off the waistband of my pants and fell on the floor. I have dropped this phone many many times, but it has held up quite well, so I wasn't worried about that part. Only what happened after that is: a car came along. There were no other cars on the road at 5:30 in the morning, but there, suddenly, was one. And like something out of a movie, where the main character (a lovable loser no doubt, perhaps played by Steve Carrell), is shown to be having a Really Bad Day, this car proceeds to run straight over my phone. It could have been anywhere on the three lane road, but it chose at that moment to be right there, and its front wheels right there, and at the moment of contact, which appeared to me at least to be playing in slow-motion, my phone obviously exploded into pieces. (If it were a movie, it would also have been raining, and the car would have then driven through a puddle and sprayed me.)

So. I need a new cell phone.

I stopped by my local T-Mobile hut on my way home to get a cheap replacement phone for the time being--I need my phone at a bare minimum for work, forget texting and internet and taking pictures and Those Things You Kids Do--I just need it so that the nurses and anesthetists and various staff can easily reach me--but this is a temporary fix, until I figure out what to do next. See, I really liked my old phone. It had a good camera on it, and it took DVD quality video, and while the web interface wasn't the slickest thing in the world, it was good enough for my purposes. It also didn't have all that business stuff that I never used, like Word and Excel and Crazy Business Card Organizer, because honestly, I'm not that kind of cell phone user. I liked my old phone, it was a goodly phone. And now it is a pile of plastic chips.

The saddest thing is I can't even show you a picture of the carnage, since not only is my camera phone (obviously) defunct, my regular camera also seems to have developed some horrible camera disease after I (perhaps unwisely) allowed Cal to take pictures with it, and seems to have lost all ability to focus. I'm not sure what happened, maybe something with the lens, or maybe the (hmmm hmmm) got knocked out of line with the (hmmmm). I don't know, I'm no expert on cameras. However, I suppose this is a minor point, unless one is actually interested in taking pictures that are in focus.

Anyway, I need a new cell phone now. Luckily, I seem to have some sort of business account through work (fancy!) so at least that'll cover the cost. Anyone have any good suggestions as to a suitable replacement for the Nokia N95?

perhaps not unlike the birth of reeses peanut butter cups

There was a patient today for which I was planning to do a saddle block, and in preparation, I took out a small ampule of hyperbaric bupivacaine (a kind of local anesthetic, like lidocaine) to use for the case.  The ampule is a glass cylinder, just about an inch long and as thin as a toddler's pinkie finger, with a hollow glass stem that can be snapped off before the drug is drawn up and administered.  They didn't stock hyperbaric bupivacaine in the OR where I was working today, so I actually walked all the way over to the cystoscopy suite, hunting through the drawers in three separate rooms until I found what I was looking for.  This is called MAKING AND STICKING TO YOUR ANESTHETIC PLAN.  

Well, turns out that despite my planning and despite my hunt for The Perfect Anesthetic, in the end that the case was cancelled--the procedure was listed as RECTAL EXAM UNDER ANESTHESIA and I guess he decided that was just as unappealing to him as it sounded, and never showed up.  So I put the hard-won ampule of bupivacaine in the back pocket of my scrub pants, along with my iPod and a partially eaten Power Bar, figuring I would keep it handy, just in case the opportunity might present itself for use later on.

The rest of the day went as planned, and as I was walking down the hallway at the end of the day, it occurred to me that I could sure go for the rest of that Power Bar.  It was all warm and melty from being pressed next to my butt all day (SO GRAPHIC) but I figured that would just make it easier to eat, because if you've ever tried to eat a cold Power Bar, you know that it turns to cement and you'll be working on that thing for hours.  For those of you who are just disgusted at this point, please note that the Power Bar was simply next to my butt, but at no point during the day did it ever touch my butt.  Got it?  There was no Power Bar to butt contact.  Therefore, still good!  So I extricated the bar from my pocket, peeled back a little more of the foil, and without really looking, took a bite.

The first thing I thought when I felt the crunch was that this was just an unusually potent flavor crumble, the likes of which are seen in certain flavors of Power Bar--for example, Vanilla Crisp.  However, the texture of the crunch was different from that of a Rice Krispie embedded in some sort of gluey carbohydrate matrix--much more crisp, much more bite, almost like a chip.  The next thing I noticed (and this was probably just a fraction of a second later) was that this Power Bar tasted awful, kind of watery and bitter, like chemicals.  What had just happened?  Had I just shattered a tooth?  How could I break my tooth on a Power Bar?  And what was all this foul liquid leaking out?  Some sort of mercury filling amalgam?  Some sort of frightening nerve pulp liquified by years of subpar dental care on that crappy resident health insurance plan?  What the hell was going on here?

I looked at the Power Bar in my hands.  And what I saw was this: the vial of bupivacaine had, over the course of the day, worked its way into the bar itself, with heat and time pressing and molding itself directly into the goo.  And when I bit into the Power Bar, I had actually bitten into the vial.  I bit through glass.  I WAS EATING GLASS.

Needless to say, I spent the next minute assiduously pooling my saliva and spitting into a sink, for fear (perhaps after one too many Tales of Intrigue) that I would swallow microscopic glass shards and cut myself internally and DIE.  I do, however, think that the Power Bar saved me to some degree--it was so gluey and sticky that most of the glass shards just kind of got pressed into it, where they stayed in place, like bug in amber.  (Aside: does anyone think that bugs in amber make creepy jewelery?  I mean, I get it, amber is a pretty color, and nature is beautiful, whatever.  BUT THEY ARE DEAD BUGS.  I do not want to wear dead bugs as earrings, sorry.)

I thought that hazards of the workplace in anesthesia mostly consisted of environmental exposures, like standing next to the fluoro beam for hours at a time, or of biohazards like getting blood sprayed in your eye after someone dings the renal artery or some such thing.  However, I now have to expand my scope of workplace hazards, those being the improbable hazards facilitated by my own ridiculousness.  If anyone has a story worse than this, I would like to hear it.

(And for those thinking one step beyond: yes, my tongue and lower lip were quite numb for about half an hour afterwards.)

wiggly wiggly world




Have I explained to you about The Wiggles? As a public service, I feel I must.

Cal likes watching The Wiggles. We have a handful of Wiggles DVDs lying around. Or, as Call calls them, "Wiggles DVDVDVDVDVDs." At first, I only tolerated them, because, you know, the things we do for our children. However, the emotions I feel for the Wiggles have evolved over time. I started initially watching them with a mixture of embarrassment and pity. Grown men dancing about singing about the glories of fruit salad? How unseemly. But then, somehow, they started to endear themselves to me with their unselfconscious capering, and now I love them. I love The Wiggles. But not like that. I am still one step away from becoming these ladies. But just one step.

Much like the Beatles, there are four Wiggles. Unlike the Beatles, however, The Wiggles are color-coded so that you can tell them apart. Also as with any good boy band, each Wiggle has his schtick. Jeff (the purple Wiggle) always falls asleep. Anthony (the blue Wiggle) eats a lot. Murray (the red Wiggle) plays the guitar. And Greg (the yellow Wiggle) sings. He sings about dancing with your mates and tying your kangaroo down, sport. Oh, and I should mention that the Wiggles are Australian. Those accents! Most of the songs and humor translate reasonably well for American kid sensibilities, though there occasionally is the need for dubbed over footnotes. For example, the explanation that "barbie" means barbecue, not "Barbie."

The reason this is coming up is because I just bought a couple of new ("fresh") Wiggles DVDVDVDVDs off of half.com to entertain Cal during our trip to Florida in a few weeks. Three brand new DVDs for less than $12. Dude, I am sold. (Though Joe has pointed out that really someone should make a website called quarter.com. Now there's an idea. Also, Seven Minute Abs.) So I was looking through The Wiggles selection, and saw one that looked good, only upon closer inspection this DVDVDVDVD featured Sam, the new yellow Wiggle. (Greg retired from The Wiggles about a year ago due to health reasons.) And I was like, "Ugh, no! Not Sam! Greg 4 evah! Woo!"

If The Wiggles ever appeared on TRL, I would totally be standing outside the studio holding a sign.