Been slow this week and most of the calls have been for young people with the flu. Yesterday I had a seventeen-year old with fever and diarrhea. He spoke in a death bed whisper. I wanted to say you are not on TV or trying out for a movie role — there is nothing wrong with your voice. Me, I have a sinus infection again — runny nose, cough. This winter has been the worst for me. The bird flu ever hits, I am going to be the canary in the coal mine. It seems I have had every thing this winter.
Another young person call I had the day before was a lethargic twenty-eight year old who had taken too many ambien. The doctor had told her to take one before bedtime. Well everytime she went to bed, she was taking an ambien. She’d take a nap, she’d take an ambien. She’d get up to use the bathroom, go back to bed and take another ambien. The phone would ring, she’d answer it, talk to her girlfriend for awhile, and then get back in bed and take another ambien. “The doctor ought to have explained that better,” she said.
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I’m still waiting to get a preceptee. It’s looking like when I get back from Baltimore I’ll start training someone.
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Yesterday the boss asked us if we wanted hot dogs. Our base is designed to also function as a shelter. There is a special locked room room with a big kitchen, meat freezer, big grille, etc. The last general meeting we had there were a lot of extra hot dogs so we put them in the big freezer to supplement the other frozen stuff they had in there for emergencies. The next thing I knew the boss was running out of the room. About a minute later the smell hit me, and I was dry heaving too. Somehow the power had gotten cut off to freezer and when he opened the door, the rotten meat smell hit him. It smelled just like a several day old dead body. “I’m not even putting the leads on,” I said. “Time of death — 12:45. I’m out of here.”
We had to wheel the freezer outside and hose it down, and then clean it out with bleach.
Nasty.
No hot dogs for my lunch.
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We got a letter from one of the hospitals that they will no longer be taking our blood tubes. Ten years ago all the hospitals took them. We drew blood on all the patients. Then one of the bigger hospitals stopped taking them, claiming their lab couldn’t process them or something. Now the other big hospital won’t take them due to some new system where you need to be assigned lab numbers, and since we don’t work for the hospital we can’t get lab numbers. Some people say the hospitals have stopped taking bloods so they can charge big bucks when they draw the blood. Others say it is another issue. Who knows? I will miss taking the bloods out of my pocket and handing them to the nurses and saying, “Oh, and I got bloods for you.” And they always smiled and said, “Thank you! You’re the best!”
In the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald: “That thing is gone. That thing is gone. That thing will come back no more.”
On the other hand, drawing blood could be a pain. I usually figure out how far I am from the hospital, figure out everything I need to do and how long it will take me, and then use that to either have my partner help me in the back or else have him start driving while I do everything, all timed so it is done by our arrival at the hospital. While most of the time the blood draws were real quick, sometimes the blood draws would take the whole trip. You have the IV in, you want to get the blood out, but it is coming really slow and after awhile you become an expert at positioning and repositioning to keep the blood filling the tubes. Now it will just be, boom! slam the line in, flush it, tape it down, and on to the next task.