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?

Bad Case of the Mondays

Saturday I was on call, which consists of me hanging out in the ER admitting patients to the hospital. One of the patients I admitted came in because she had abdominal pain and pancreatitis, which x-ray showed to be from gall stones. "No big deal," we tell her, "We'll just admit you, get pancreas to cool off, and then we'll take your gall bladder out. You'll be out in a few days."
Sunday I came in to check on her, and her labs are screwy. She definitely has gall stones, but it looks like something else might be going on. "Probably not a big deal," we say, "but it's better to be safe than sorry." So we order a CT scan, and call it a day.
Yesterday we come in and take a look at the CT scan. Turns out that instead of a liver, this nice lady a huge blob of cancer. "Hey, remember how we thought we'd just take out your gall bladder?" we say to her, "Well, it turns out you're actually going to die. Soon." So instead of surgery, we're giving her medication to try and make her comfortable, and sending her home to enjoy what little time she has left.

I really hate Mondays.

Adelaide at 5 months

We've finally taken more pictures of Adelaide. We're kind of failing at this whole obsessive dog owners thing. To make up for it, I think we'll get some custom t-shirts made with Ada's picture on them. Anyway, here are some before and after shots of Adelaide at 2 mo. and 5 mo.
For the rest of the new pictures, you can look on Facebook.

Overheard in the Hospital

Last night in the doctors' work area:

-Resident talking on the phone stops suddenly, and after a long pause-
"Is that my patient coding in the background?"

I love this place.

Have a cold one for Jesus

I don't talk much about our church, but this is a great story I can't leave untold. Actually, it's two stories.

First, just before Thanksgiving, our pastor told a story in one of his sermons. This is the gist of it: A guy's wife's family likes to drink beer. This guy has always been told that alcohol is of the devil, so he doesn't drink, and so becomes the odd man out during Thanksgiving. He tells the pastor, who asks if he's a recovering alcoholic and if he likes beer. The guy answers no and yes, and so the pastor tell him to have a beer and Thanksgiving and see what happens. The guy comes back and tells a great story about how he had a single beer, and the whole family instantly warmed up to him because they no longer saw him as being "holier than thou." So that's an unbelievable story to hear from the pulpit in the first place, but here's the benediction at the end of the service: Go in His peace, and have a cold one for Jesus. Amazing.

Second, today our pastor goes off on a tangent about drinking. He says, "Listen, I'm from Wisconsin, and I like beer. I like wine too, but I like beer." He goes on to talk about how crazy the South is about alcohol. He says, "You know, the same verses that talk about drunkenness also talk about gluttony, but nobody here ever talks about how bad it is to throw back a ton of fried chicken. And on top of that, no person's solution to gluttony has ever been to stop eating. The solution is moderation. And that is why I'll still drink beer."

It's so great to hear stuff like this come from the pulpit. At the same time, though, I'm disappointed that the church (at least here in the Bible Belt) is so ridiculous, and that I get so excited to hear a pastor endorse drinking in moderation. It seems so adolescent sometimes. Nevertheless, I appreciate so much that my pastor has the balls to say this stuff. It makes Sundays okay again.