Thursday, March 14, 2013

Not safe for appetite.

Hide your bananas no longer, ladies and gentlemen. They're now letting me sew up real people, unsupervised*. Protip: people skin holds a stitch better than banana skin, even if you have to use chromic gut sometimes.

Other camouflaged-for-privacy-reasons patient protips: small children may be shockingly fastidious and therefore disapprove of even a little plaster dust on their otherwise pristine clothing; it's a red flag if you ask your patient about their pain and they sweep their body from knees to neck and say "all over here"; and the people around you can in fact see the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed joy in your eyes when the words "major cellulitis" or "really juicy abscess" are uttered in your presence.

So I've been reading the oldest entries from The Underwear Drawer***, and I'm so titillated when I recognize NYC-specific medical tidbits. Short call at [Upper East Side Hospital]? I know exactly where you're talking about, ma'am. And that picture is definitely from my favorite stall at the farmer's market.

No cooking tonight. The orthopedists gave me free food.

*This patient's lawyer was in the room while I worked on him. I wish I could make this stuff up. There was a good reason to keep the lawyer in there, though, which I can't tell you because that would be too much of a privacy issue, but trust me in that it was a good reason that had nothing to do with the fact that I'm a student who can't be trusted not to accidentally give someone a lidocaine a-line**.
**I am completely and totally kidding. Drawing back on my syringes like a boss.
***Major doctor crush on this woman. For the uninitiated, a doctor crush is an intellectual, totally aromantic crush on a particularly smart and/or witty and/or educational physician person that makes you want to duckling after them all day long and bask in their amazingness. Am I the only one who gets these?

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