My first night in the ER

Within the first hour I'm there, two people come come in with heart attacks.
A while later, this tiny Vietnamese lady comes in who speaks no English and hates doctors. She has this huge bleeding lump on her head that the family says has been there all day. The family swears she didn't fall, but as I'm sewing up wound, the CT comes back showing a significant subdural hematoma.
At the same time, this huge guy is brought in because he was found lying in the street, unresponsive, with white powder all around his nose. The rest of the shift was spent making sure this guy stayed very "relaxed" in a quiet room. With two police officers outside just in case we failed at relaxing him.
The rest of the shift was pretty laid back, until the end, when a really nice old lady comes in with all these crazy wounds. What happened? She was out with her tiny little old lady (or Zach Herbert) dog, and these two Great Dane mutts run and go after her little dog. What does this lady do? She grabs her dog and holds it above her head while these two dogs maul her. She had bites that seriously went to the bone. When neighbors came out and chased the dogs off, she was still holding her dog up. That's legit.

Quote of the day

"Have you ever known a fat person who didn't like yellow?"
-Laura Reese

And so it begins...

Sunday was a very busy day for me. First, I moved my home-brewed beer over to a secondary fermenter. I had this idea of brewing beer a couple of months ago, and it went something like this: "Well, I've made wine and I'm aging some whiskey, what other alcohol can I make?" and of course beer was next on the list. Since I've never brewed beer before, and it seemed like a fairly complicated process (which equals a high likelihood I'll screw it up), I decided to scale down the operation. A typical recipe makes 6 gallons of beer. That's a heck of a lot of beer, especially if it's messed up and makes you go blind. So I decided to scale it down to a single gallon and test it out. There are two problems already with this idea- first, it reduces the ingredients to an obscenely small scale, and second, I didn't have Laura double check my math. Nevertheless, I persevered and will have about ten bottles of beer just in time for the Crawfish Boil.

Second, and more the reason for the title, I also started a new batch of wine. This current batch is Pinot Noir. I'm excited, because this is our favorite wine, and it's normally pretty expensive in the stores. My fermenting it myself, it comes out to about 3 bucks a bottle. I'm also excited because I got to use smoked oak chips in the fermentation, which should be mind-blowing. Anyway, the thing about making your own wine is that it gets better with age. With our Reisling that we made before, it had to age at least three months. With a red like this Pinot, it has to age a minimum of six months, and should be aged about nine months. So, we'll probably break out our first bottle around Christmas. Be there. It'll be awesome.

My crazy mondays

I'll start with last Monday. Last Monday was awesome because 1) Somebody died on our service, but I missed because 2) I got free sushi. So, basically, we have this chump of a Residency Director who wants to have weekly meetings just so we can listen to him pontificate for hours on end. Well, this rotation, he met with us only once, and thus felt obliged to take us out to eat. Since, he had to cancel this meeting as well, he told us to go out and the department would foot the bill. We all were craving sushi, and so we go this place where you sit an ovoid bar, and a train circles on top of the bar carrying various types of sushi. It was awesome. And while I enjoyed this delicious meal, a 40 year old guy died because nobody figured out his potassium was out of control.
So, this past Monday, I started my geriatrics rotation. I go in to see this sweet 86 year old lady who I met in the ER the month before. So, it was kind of weird seeing this lady so long afterwords and on a completely different rotation. Well, it was great, because we were like old friends, and come to find out, she's been having 2-4 glasses of wine each night. Since this constitutes alcoholism, it was my job to talk her out of drinking. When I started to talk to her about it, she goes, "Oh honey, this isn't bad. I finally gave up my Jim Beam last month." Needless to say, this lady is awesome. So, it all ended up with me getting her to drink 1-2 glasses per night, and me convincing my attending that a nice 86 year old lady who's stuck in her room all day deserves a few glasses of wine each day. I actually wrote an order for this lady to have a glass of wine at night.
I'm also going to count this morning as Monday, allowing its craziness to fall under this blog's title. Today I went to a nursing home/psych facility to talk to people with dementia and such. My first patient is some elderly guy who's bipolar. During the course of our interview, we get to talking about his roommate. Guess who his roommate was. It was the guy from this day. Yes, Mr. Anti-Christ himself was living there. Unbelievable. Well, I of course ask him what happened to the guy, and it turns out he left over the weekend, got on a bus, and took off for Canada. Of course. Where else would the Anti-Christ go?