Scrappy Blog

Just checkin’ my perception of reality.

My clinic closes at 4:30 and is closed on weekends.

Today (Friday) at 4:28 a patient called and said she needed me to call in 2 months worth of her asthma medicine today because she was going to be in Africa for the next two months.

Review of chart notes sees that the first reference to this planned trip was 6 months ago.  It’s not a surprise trip.

2 weeks ago, she saw our travel medicine expert in the morning, who gave her a list of to-do’s for her travel including “be sure to get your asthma medicine refilled before the trip”.  Shortly after, she had an appointment with one of my colleagues and didn’t say a darn thing about asthma medicine.

We haven’t actually given her any asthma medicine in 3 years.  Further, last mention of the asthma medicine we have is more than 6 months ago, where there’s a note that she was no longer taking the medicine because she no longer had any asthma symptoms.  So it seems this isn’t even a routine refill, it actually involves newly emerged symptoms for which the old medicine might or might not be effective. 

I called her and told her in no uncertain terms that she’d screwed up.  I told her that it was mere chance that I even saw her request before the weekend, as things that come in after 3 or so tend to be addressed the next business day.  I pointed out that for refills of routine medicines, she should allow 2-3 business days in case her primary doc is out of clinic one day; I also pointed out that this situation was not routine as her asthma was newly active. 

I told her I would bail her a** out this time but I would never, never do it again; if she ever needs a refill with less than 2 days notice she can forget it.

Am I crazy?

Seeing lots of interesting discussion over the recent hoorah on LJ.  One interesting comment from

immlass

: “I do wonder why people thought listing incest or pedophilia as an interest on a fannish journal was a good idea. ”  And

hsapiens

points out that it’s possible to have an academic interest in those topics – people in fields like sociology, psychology, public health, etc, want to study why incest (or pedophilia) happens, what its impact is, how the behavior relates to the surrounding community and culture, and what can be done about it.

Which made me think that, many amateur authors may be using fiction or fanfiction as a medium to search for understanding about these tough issues. Using a fictional setting and the relative anonymity of a pen name, writers can set up a scenario, play it out to its conclusion, and get feedback about it.  They can probe the implications of incest (or twincest or pedophilia, or heck, the underage twins having sex with the much older giant squid for that matter) in a way that doesn’t put anyone real into harmful situations…

Not sure what my point is.

I’ve loved the snapdragon ever since my Mom showed me how you can pinch the little flowers and make the “dragon’s” mouth open and close….

OK, I’m just too entertained by the geek zeitgeist.

First, there’s a hascheezburger picture from today… A lovely blending of geek pop culture.

Then there’s the delightful discovery that if you go to an online Dutch-English translator and type in “lol”, you learn the word means “fun” or “amusement” or “a feeling of delight at being entertained”.  Which makes me wonder – was this already a Dutch word, or has the Dutch language absorbed the internet acronym?

Have made only small accomplishments today – registered for next semester at school, bought some plane tix to go see my parents on their 45th anniversary (Shhhhh, don’t tell them, it’s a surprise!), then spent several hours sitting around playing with photos in preparation for making a scrapbook of Koshka pictures for K.  I heart photoshop in a big way, but I tend to get carried away.  I start off doing a couple fixes for obvious dust spots on a photo.  But by the time I’m done with the pic, the floor looks vacuumed, the cat has no more redeye, and K no longer has a zit on his chin; we’re all happy and clean and airbrushed within an inch of our lives.

I demo’d Photoshop’s capabilities to my Mom by fixing up a picture where interesting shadow angles had given her no chin and my brother two chins.  So she now calls it “that chin-transfer program”.

Which wasn’t very productive on the professional front but I was irritable and tired after being on call all weekend.  The classic call comes in at 1 AM; the patient says “Oh, I’m so glad you called!” (acting like I’d just picked up the phone to call for a chat, not like she’d just paged me on the line I’m not allowed to ignore).  Then proceeds to tell me that she’s had a symptom – not a life-threatening one –  for the last three days.  When I point out that the most effective way to work up the symptom would be to SEE HER, IN CLINIC, DURING ORDINARY BUSINESS HOURS, she acts put out because, well, the symptom is interfering with her sleep tonight so “what should I do?” And seems terribly dissatisfied with my answer “Well, curl up with a good book and a cup of something soothing and decaf, and set an alarm for start of business hours just in case you do end up falling asleep”.  Grumph.

Worst call ever, though, was a few years ago. The woman, who called at three in the morning, had been having abdominal pain for four years. She wasn’t actually having the pain that evening but she called me in a panic because it had just occurred to her that the pain might be pregnancy.  See, she’d had a hysterectomy, so there was no place for the baby to come out so the pain might be a four-year-old kid struggling to tear its way out of her body.  She was genuinely terrified until eventually I was able to convince her that it was extremely unlikely that she’d gotten pregnant at age 56. 

Begins to make you understand why people (e.g. Michael Crighton, Robin Cook) leave careers in medicine and go on to write highly fanciful novels…

What is the etiology of the word “gobsmacked”?

I seem to run across it a lot lately and I don’t know where it came from.

Anyone else know?

Anyone have any insights about why, when I ask Excel to produce the world’s simplest chart (a pie chart from a column of data with all of three categories), I get this crazy pie chart with a wedge for every line in the column? 

It’s stupid stuff like this that makes a simple paper take weeks to write.  Time to go write an R script to make one #@$%+! pie chart!

Maybe as long as I’m writing scripts anyway I’ll set up some regressions to determine what demographic factors are the best determinants of user satisfaction…. yeah, it’ll be worth it.

Yeah.

Sure.

Boy, I feel old.

Went this morning and watched my first freshman group graduate.  It’s been amazing watching these kids grow from eager 17-year-old freshmen to the adult-like graduates that walked across the stage today.  One is headed off to Spain to do an archaeology gig, another is going to be designing software in California, and another will be teaching English in France.  They’re soooo cool!

The day was bright and the sun intense – I’ll be regretting this sunburn tomorrow.  And I didn’t make it to the art car parade, because after several hours of graduation followed by lunch with the celebrants, I was simply to beat to deal with the parade.  Oh well, I’ll see it next year.

Then we went and looked at statues, hoping to find something to put in the garden that Koshka would have liked.  We have planted a little patch of mint (her favorite herb) in her honor, and were thinking we’d put some sort of whimsical statue and some sort of bench by it, so we can sit and enjoy a quiet pretty place and think of her.  We were tempted by the stone lions but decided that while their proud feline posture was appropriate, their faces were just too snobby.  So we’ll keep looking.  Shopping is harder when you don’t know what you’re looking for, you just know you’ll recognize it when you see it.

johnbrandon

is responsible for a new addiction:  Girl Genius.  Fortunately, Amazon.com has been willing to be our supplier….

Happy Mom’s day to all y’all Moms out there!