Sometimes things happen that render you paralyzed with the horror of it all, speechless with its senselessness, dizzy with the Why of it, and nauseated with the thought that there may never be an answer. When things of this variety come wheeled in on a gurney through the hospital emergency room doors, I have endogenous adrenaline to help override the otherwise innate desire within me to make sense of the situation. When there is a patient with severe closed head injuries due to a high speed car crash and another patient next door with a pneumothorax, a long bone fracture and a blood alcohol level triple the legal limit, it simply doesn’t matter in the moment of their arrival that the drunk patient is the driver of the car that caused the accident. The only thing that matters is timely and appropriate care. That’s what I’ve been trained to do, and so I do it.
When things of this variety happen in a small community of which I am not directly affiliated…there is no adrenaline, there is nothing for me to busy myself with, and I am allowed to sit, in stunned silence, to take it all in…and to wish, like the students and faculty at Virginia Tech and like the rest of the country, that things like this didn’t happen.
If there’s anything I’ve come to appreciate in my line of work, it’s that life is fragile and tragically fickle…but the human soul and spirit can sometimes be unimaginably, outstandingly valiant and invincible. I just wish it didn’t take tragedies like this to make the world realize that.
Showing posts with label rare instances of speechlessness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rare instances of speechlessness. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
I can't wait to have babies
There are pregnant women all around me. The downside of this is that the bathrooms are always occupied…bladders the size of walnuts, these women have. The upside is that I look egoliciously slender in comparison. I can dig it. Too bad the human gestation period is only 9 months, I could really get used to this.
The other upside is that I get to learn from the choices that these women with child are making. Exhibit A: Prenatal Yoga. One of the first-time preggers that I know, Ms. Touch My Belly And I’ll Cut You, decided to step outside of her non-maternal, pragmatic box and try pre-natal yoga. Since making that decision, she’s spent every moment trying to get back into her box. It’s not that she can’t get into the yoga so much as she can’t get into the 30 minute segment preceding the yoga in which all the preggers in attendance sit in a circle to eat organic, vegan granola, watch their armpit hair grow, and talk about their feelings (particularly their feelings on their opinion that women who want epidurals are pussies).
Ms. Touch My Belly And I’ll Cut You called me up one afternoon to tell me about a particularly hairy session in which everyone in the circle had to discuss her birthing plan. This, for those of you who don’t know, is where you get to make a list of all the things you do and do not want going on during your laboring, ie:
- I would like to have an enema before pushing the baby out so that my child is not delivered into the curry I ate last night
- There is to be no medical student of any variety allowed anywhere near my snatch
- If, so help me GOD, anyone tries to comfort me with Kenny G, I will perform my OWN episiotomy to expedite things
…so on and so forth. Anyway, Ms. TMBAICY relayed that one of her classmates, Mrs. Clit, described a technique that really helped make the delivery of her first child sooo much more relaxing and “personal.” Apparently, Mr. and Mrs. Clit wanted the birth of their child “to be as intimate as the conception.” So, to facilitate this, during labor, Mr. Clit stimulated Mrs. Clit’s clit!! Just in case you missed that: HE STIMULATED HER CLITORIS DURING LABOR!!
Jesus, you can’t MAKE this stuff up!
All Ihave to will say, is that if Mrs. Clit was able to have this wish from her birthing plan fulfilled, I should have no problem getting unlimited crackers and pasteurized cheese in between my epidurally-attenuated contractions. And I will proudly proclaim this to my fellow pre-natal yoga classmates in between taking bites of my ham and cheese omelet and flashing them my freshly shaved armpits.
(Hopefully not anytime soon though.)
The other upside is that I get to learn from the choices that these women with child are making. Exhibit A: Prenatal Yoga. One of the first-time preggers that I know, Ms. Touch My Belly And I’ll Cut You, decided to step outside of her non-maternal, pragmatic box and try pre-natal yoga. Since making that decision, she’s spent every moment trying to get back into her box. It’s not that she can’t get into the yoga so much as she can’t get into the 30 minute segment preceding the yoga in which all the preggers in attendance sit in a circle to eat organic, vegan granola, watch their armpit hair grow, and talk about their feelings (particularly their feelings on their opinion that women who want epidurals are pussies).
Ms. Touch My Belly And I’ll Cut You called me up one afternoon to tell me about a particularly hairy session in which everyone in the circle had to discuss her birthing plan. This, for those of you who don’t know, is where you get to make a list of all the things you do and do not want going on during your laboring, ie:
- I would like to have an enema before pushing the baby out so that my child is not delivered into the curry I ate last night
- There is to be no medical student of any variety allowed anywhere near my snatch
- If, so help me GOD, anyone tries to comfort me with Kenny G, I will perform my OWN episiotomy to expedite things
…so on and so forth. Anyway, Ms. TMBAICY relayed that one of her classmates, Mrs. Clit, described a technique that really helped make the delivery of her first child sooo much more relaxing and “personal.” Apparently, Mr. and Mrs. Clit wanted the birth of their child “to be as intimate as the conception.” So, to facilitate this, during labor, Mr. Clit stimulated Mrs. Clit’s clit!! Just in case you missed that: HE STIMULATED HER CLITORIS DURING LABOR!!
Jesus, you can’t MAKE this stuff up!
All I
(Hopefully not anytime soon though.)
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Play music...not with peoples' lives
While in my car, I usually either listen to one of the 5 CD’s I haven’t changed since I put them in there (which was when I bought the car 3 years ago) or to NPR. But one morning recently, I’d had enough of Postal Service and had already listened to the morning news round that was on it’s second go of airtime on NPR. So I turned my radio to one of the local radio stations, one that has a very popular morning show. And I quickly realized why I haven’t made a habit of this...
I’m not sure if it was luck or planetary aligning karma, but at the exact moment I turned to the station, one of the two morning DJ’s began speaking, with absolutely NO knowledge, on this 'great' new weight loss procedure: The Stomach Balloon. It wasn’t so much the “Oh! My! God! I am, like, totally going to get that! What a totally, like, fantastic idea! Eat all the food you want, like, and get full faster! I TOTALLY want one!” that annoyed me. I mean, it was annoying to hear a perfectly grown woman speaking with all the aptitude of a 13-year-old who knows better but just wants to be cool. And forget the fact that this balloon, while it may be a temporizing measure for weight loss, it does not change one’s lifestyle. Anyone who’s lost weight and kept weight off knows that it’s the healthy decisions that you make everyday going forward that make it happen. Not some balloon you put in and then take out a few months later. Anyway, what was really annoying about the segment, was that this DJ then said, “Where can I GET one of those?? Oh?!? They’re only in Europe? Hmm…maybe I’ll just go home and swallow a balloon!”
Oh, for the LOVE. I envisioned a whole bunch of desperate overweight women beginning the day with a seemingly harmless morning radio show and ending it with a visit to the ER. Thankfully, at least to my knowledge, there were no adverse events due to that extremely ignorant broadcast.
The reason this broadcast bothered me is because I think that TV and radio has an obligation, to a certain degree, to report responsibly. Which is to say, that if they don’t know about something, something that could harm someone, they should either NOT talk about it, talk about it but with the disclaimer that they are perhaps not well-informed, or investigate it properly before talking about it. Seems like common sense to me. In an ideal world, where the truth sells more than sensationalism, of course....
And in this ideal world, things like what happened in Sacramento, California recently wouldn’t happen. The morning DJ’s on a popular radio station there held a “Hold your wee for a Wii” contest in which the contestants had to drink as much water as possible without urinating or vomiting. Little did these DJ's know, even water is not innocuous. And despite the fact that a nurse even called into the show and told them that drinking too much water could be dangerous, they continued on with the contest. And because of it, a 28-year-old wife and mother of three small children died. All because she drank so much water that she decreased the osmotic pressure of her blood which, among other things, causes brain swelling that can be, and in this case was, lethal. And all for a Nintendo Wii.
I think Robert Browning put it best: “Ignorance is not innocence, but sin.”
I’m not sure if it was luck or planetary aligning karma, but at the exact moment I turned to the station, one of the two morning DJ’s began speaking, with absolutely NO knowledge, on this 'great' new weight loss procedure: The Stomach Balloon. It wasn’t so much the “Oh! My! God! I am, like, totally going to get that! What a totally, like, fantastic idea! Eat all the food you want, like, and get full faster! I TOTALLY want one!” that annoyed me. I mean, it was annoying to hear a perfectly grown woman speaking with all the aptitude of a 13-year-old who knows better but just wants to be cool. And forget the fact that this balloon, while it may be a temporizing measure for weight loss, it does not change one’s lifestyle. Anyone who’s lost weight and kept weight off knows that it’s the healthy decisions that you make everyday going forward that make it happen. Not some balloon you put in and then take out a few months later. Anyway, what was really annoying about the segment, was that this DJ then said, “Where can I GET one of those?? Oh?!? They’re only in Europe? Hmm…maybe I’ll just go home and swallow a balloon!”
Oh, for the LOVE. I envisioned a whole bunch of desperate overweight women beginning the day with a seemingly harmless morning radio show and ending it with a visit to the ER. Thankfully, at least to my knowledge, there were no adverse events due to that extremely ignorant broadcast.
The reason this broadcast bothered me is because I think that TV and radio has an obligation, to a certain degree, to report responsibly. Which is to say, that if they don’t know about something, something that could harm someone, they should either NOT talk about it, talk about it but with the disclaimer that they are perhaps not well-informed, or investigate it properly before talking about it. Seems like common sense to me. In an ideal world, where the truth sells more than sensationalism, of course....
And in this ideal world, things like what happened in Sacramento, California recently wouldn’t happen. The morning DJ’s on a popular radio station there held a “Hold your wee for a Wii” contest in which the contestants had to drink as much water as possible without urinating or vomiting. Little did these DJ's know, even water is not innocuous. And despite the fact that a nurse even called into the show and told them that drinking too much water could be dangerous, they continued on with the contest. And because of it, a 28-year-old wife and mother of three small children died. All because she drank so much water that she decreased the osmotic pressure of her blood which, among other things, causes brain swelling that can be, and in this case was, lethal. And all for a Nintendo Wii.
I think Robert Browning put it best: “Ignorance is not innocence, but sin.”
Friday, February 2, 2007
Ahhhh, the irony of it all....
This story hit the New York Times the other day: Posing as a family, sex offenders stun a town
It's a lengthy article so here's the nutshell: A 29-year-old, named Neil H. Rodreick II, de-pubes himself and enrolls in school as a 12-year-old student. He does this with the help of Mr. Stiffler and Mr. Snow, both of whom Rodreick convinces he is a minor thus inspiring them to play along in the ruse as his grandfather and uncle. Together, they are one big, happy, disgusting family of illegally unregistered child sex offenders that, on their downtime, switch things up by doing each other. Until they eventually get found out.
Herein lies the irony…
The fact that the name of the town in which this whole thing went down is Surprise. That’s the actual name of the town. Surprise.
The fact that the school system that enrolled this 29-year-old 12-year-old is called the Imagine Charter School. Imagine that.
The fact that Mr. Stiffler’s name is almost too perfect for his role in this grotesque non-fiction. If I were writing this as a fictional story, the name Mr. Stiffler might have only just barely lost out to my first choice for his character: Mr. Boner.
The fact that Mr. Stiffler and Mr. Snow were “shocked” and “angry” to find out they’d been banging a perfectly legal 29-year-old the whole time. Rather than being relieved to be absolved of pedophilia charges, they were UPSET!!
I literally had to make sure I wasn’t reading the National Enquirer when Ratatat first emailed me this story. Absolutely. Horridly. Detestable.
It's a lengthy article so here's the nutshell: A 29-year-old, named Neil H. Rodreick II, de-pubes himself and enrolls in school as a 12-year-old student. He does this with the help of Mr. Stiffler and Mr. Snow, both of whom Rodreick convinces he is a minor thus inspiring them to play along in the ruse as his grandfather and uncle. Together, they are one big, happy, disgusting family of illegally unregistered child sex offenders that, on their downtime, switch things up by doing each other. Until they eventually get found out.
Herein lies the irony…
The fact that the name of the town in which this whole thing went down is Surprise. That’s the actual name of the town. Surprise.
The fact that the school system that enrolled this 29-year-old 12-year-old is called the Imagine Charter School. Imagine that.
The fact that Mr. Stiffler’s name is almost too perfect for his role in this grotesque non-fiction. If I were writing this as a fictional story, the name Mr. Stiffler might have only just barely lost out to my first choice for his character: Mr. Boner.
The fact that Mr. Stiffler and Mr. Snow were “shocked” and “angry” to find out they’d been banging a perfectly legal 29-year-old the whole time. Rather than being relieved to be absolved of pedophilia charges, they were UPSET!!
I literally had to make sure I wasn’t reading the National Enquirer when Ratatat first emailed me this story. Absolutely. Horridly. Detestable.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
