After Thanksgiving Day off, cousin Steve dropped me off at the Wallingford train station where I caught the SEPTA train in to Market East Station and crossed the street to the bus station to catch my Greyhound Coach d’Elegance back to Manhattan. As fellow passengers were boarding, the Indian woman behind me complained when I reclined my [...]
Entries Tagged as ‘Work’
October 8, 2008
“A soft answer turneth away wrath…
…but a witty one can silence a fool.”
Living in New York City means living in close quarters with people who are at times cocky, arrogant, brusque, dismissive, and overbearing. People do not sit on the front porch sipping lemonade here; they do not bring casseroles to new neighbors. No, they run over others who happen to get [...]
September 24, 2008
Team captain call
Tonight will be my fifth “Team Captain”, or “TC” call. The standard anesthesiology overnight call team at my training program includes an attending, a senior resident (the TC), a junior resident (the assistant TC, or ATC), and two first-year residents. There are also six “short call” people who typically go home somewhere between 1800 and [...]
July 10, 2008
Maybe I should get a desk job…
Editor’s note: I wrote this post some time ago, but waited an unspecified length of time to post it to protect patient privacy. It should be noted that the post portrays graphic medical situations in raw, unedited detail, so readers with a delicate constitution may wish to stop reading here.
Yesterday afternoon’s code was one of the…shall we say…earthiest [...]
July 8, 2008
Red up, blue up, volume in
Such is the chatter I pick up going on between the cardiac surgeons and the perfusionists. The simplicity and efficiency of the lingo belie the complexity of the cardiopulmonary bypass machine.
My first month in cardiac anesthesiology nearly a year ago was rather stressful, with often difficult arterial and central venous lines, intense and dynamic physiological perturbations, [...]
July 7, 2008
I’m a fan of methadone
One of the more interesting parts of spending time on the pain management services was getting more comfortable using methadone. Methadone is a synthetic opioid (mu-receptor agonist) which was developed in Germany in the 1930s since there were predictions of opium shortages. Methadone has a very long duration of action (making it well-suited for recovering addicts) [...]
June 27, 2008
Guilty pleasures
I had an epiphany of sorts on the train today. I was riding in relative peace–as much as was possible wedged between two strangers in a car whose air-conditioning was a bit like a gentle breeze in Death Valley–when a nearby two-year-old began to cry. This was no “I’m scared” cry, or “I’m hurt” cry. [...]
June 26, 2008
Final Jeopardy
In lieu of grand rounds this morning, we held our annual Jeopardy contest which pits the somewhat aggressive attendings (and CRNAs) against a coterie of anesthesiology residents. The attendings were the defending champions.
The anesthesia trivia came fast and furious. Julia, one our our chiefs, was our team captain, and she did a great job being nimble with [...]
June 25, 2008
Pain and palliation
Today was a rewarding day. I was called by a primary care team to assist with the care of a 25 year-old girl who is dying of cancer. This was a situation that, as unfortunate as it was, had been made more complicated by growing distrust on the part of the family. As the resident [...]
June 20, 2008
Beware, the interns have arrived…
The last couple nights on pain night float have been complicated by the fact that the new interns have apparently begun taking call. It doesn’t seem like that long ago I was beginning internship, but it’s already been three years.
As I look back at some of the earlier entries in this blog, I see some [...]
