Not to be a Downer

Well, the inevitable happened. Mr. R finally died.

He was about sixty-five or seventy and had uncontrolled diabetes and hypertension for years. He's always been unable or unwilling to come in and have us check on him.

Until he started having strokes and the small heart attack. Then, he was interesting in follow-up.  Unfortunately, he was already paralyzed on his left side. Several pressure ulcers developed on his feet and over the last twelve months or so, we had to cut off both legs above the knee. He returned with a large pressure sore over his sacrum. He stopped eating by himself and refused food and medicine while I had him in the hospital in the fall.

I urged his wife to let him go ("on to glory" as my older partner says regularly), but she insisted on a feeding tube. So that was placed. It bought us another three months. I finally got him out of the hospital in September (after a long battle with his insurance plan who didn't want to pay for a two hundred pound legless stroke victim with dementia and diabetes who wouldn't roll over on his own for his 100 pound wife to take care of him to be able to go to a nursing home).

I don't think he suffered much honestly because the truly interactive part of his brain left about two years ago. I would see glimmers of intelligence in the last six months, but mostly I think he checked out in August.

I need a beer.

Posted by Caduceus @ 9:21 pm EDT | Permalink | 2 Comments

Release Dates

I thought Tuesday was a release day?  I mean really.  Totally new game day, right?  Isn't Assassin's Creed supposed to come out today?

Apparently not.  Which stinks.  I get a half day once a week at the office (it makes up for working all weekend several weekends a month, in my book).  This day is Tuesday.

I don't you to think that I'm sitting there slobbering at the local box store, waiting for the grille to go up so I can run to the video game counter and plunk my money down for the latest at greatest game.  Most of the time I buy after the game has been out for a few months and the price is right or second-hand (like lions).

We were running around town with the kids, who had fallen asleep in the back.  I paid my dues - waiting in the car while the wife went into the craft store and bought 80% off Halloween merchandise (more stuff I didn't know I needed next year).  And then I got a chance to browse at the local game store.

"Assassin's Creed comes out tomorrow, but I we're still taking pre-orders."

Really?  What the heck?  Slumped shoulders, I wandered out of the store, avoiding getting creamed in the parking lot.

On the upside, on the way through the mall, I got this for my three year-old daughter who is now officially Christmas-CRAZY, insisting that we decorate 41 days from Christmas.  We have vowed to wait until after Thanksgiving.  We'll see who wins this battle of wills.


Posted by Caduceus @ 9:34 pm EDT | Permalink | 1 Comments

Bad News

Last weekend I only admitted one patient to my service, which meant it was a SLOW weekend.  Constantly checked the pager to make sure I wasn't missing calls.

But, what I got was a heartbreaker. 

An older lady, a six-year breast cancer survivor came to our emergency room.  She arrived with chest pain, history of coronary artery bypass grafting.  She had negative blood work for a new heart attack and her EKG didn't look too bad.  So, I admitted her to our cardiac floor.  The ER doctor had done a D-dimer level on her, just to check for the possibility of a pulmonary embolus, a clot in the lung.  It was just barely elevated, so we did a CT scan of her chest.

The report came through and you could have hit me with a cinder block in the chest.  Multiple metastases throughout both lung fields, also probably in her liver.  I'm not her regular physician and her cancer doctor is in the next town over.  I had the duty of sitting down with her, her husband of fifty years and her grown daughter to explain that her cancer had come back.

Now we get to start picking up all the pieces.

Posted by Caduceus @ 9:52 pm EDT | Permalink | 5 Comments

Limbo

Hanging a beeper on your side means one of three things.  1.) You're a drug dealer - though most of these folks have moved exclusively to cell phones, a few hang on to the "old ways" and use beepers.  2.) You have an obsession with things from the 1990s, when beepers were king.  Not as illegal as #1, but still somewhat creepy.  3.) You're a medical/emergency professional of some sort.  In my case, #3 is true, as you can tell from the avatar. 

Wearing a pager puts you in limbo.  You only have a certain radius you can go from your home base before you get an emergency.  Don't get me wrong, I love caring for people, but a weekend-long leash is tiresome.  Well, the first weekend isn't so bad, its the every fourth weekend that you can't go more than 20 miles away  that gets frustrating.

Good thing I have videogames to take me away (cue the waterfalls and symphonic swells).  No, seriously, it keeps me sane at 2 AM when I am waiting for the emergency room or laboratory or radiology departments to call me back, but I can't go to sleep because I know that call is coming any minute.  I can fire something up and for a few minutes, my brain works on a problem at a subconscious level while I wait for results and am distracted.

Still, being in limbo stinks.

Posted by Caduceus @ 8:35 pm EDT | Permalink | 2 Comments

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away blah blah blah

Well, if that's how the LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga lays it down in the manual, it should be good.  Its irreverent IN PRINT!

Can't wait to pop this baby in.

Posted by Caduceus @ 8:47 pm EDT | Permalink | 0 Comments