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Saturday, July 18, 2009

Confusion, two ways

Dylan and I cleared a little something up today. It is not that she wants to name the baby cookie monster. It is that she thinks the baby will be baby cookie monster. I would be a little disappointed too, if I had thought that we were about to have a muppet come live in our house. I would, however, hope that the new child might be slightly less...one dimensional, would you call it?

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This last rotation has been more like House than anything else I've done so far. No one knew what was going on in any given case I saw in the hospital, which leads to all sorts of hijinks. Not sure why you're here? Let's biopsy some random stuff. Plan B? Take out your spleen. Several people got lumbar punctures looking for "we're not exactly sure what, possibly syphilis." High-dose steroids are always an option, because if it works, hey, we made you better! And we actually got fluid out of some joints, then took it down to the CRAZY lab in the basement that does all the tests for the hospital to look at it ourselves. Imagine any movie with a huge busy lab scene and that was it. One woman got diagnosed with an unusual case of a disease that's 90% fatal if untreated that no one else had figured out in her previous 10 days in the hospital. Also, my boss was a misanthropic drug addict.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think this is not info average citizen wants to know about hospitals. Not reassuring.

bleisenblog said...

Oh, sorry. I didn't actually mean it to sound scary. For most people this obviously doesn't happen. These were just the very hard cases at a very big regional hospital. The patients and families were quite involved in the process and informed about why it might be worth trying each thing. It was just interesting for me to see how things break down a little bit when we don't really know what's going on.

Anonymous said...

I would be really scared if you had a cookie monster because a) he would shed a lot and b) that would mean much fewer cookies...