It's no good unless she loves you

2005-06-10 - 5:43 p.m.

Today was a much better day for me than yesterday was. I've been trying to figure out why, but I haven't yet. It was almost exactly the same as yesterday. I lolled about in bed for about 15 minutes this morning before actually getting up and taking a shower and getting ready for the day. I had twice as much caffeine this morning as yesterday morning--is that the difference?

Also, this morning there were grand rounds. They start at 7:30 and they include a free breakfast and the topic was interesting. I learned today that the low-carb diet isn't quite as much bullshit as I thought it was. My attitude before had always been that a calorie is a calorie, what's the difference where it comes from? But it turns out that carbohydrates don't suppress appetite as long and also carbohydrates raise triglycerides. It wasn't explained why these things are true, but it was interesting. Unfortunately, I was paged away in the middle of this so I didn't hear the end.

Yes, I had a stat coumadin teach to do. The interesting bit about this was that I did it through a sign language interpreter. It's hard to do, really, because it's hard to tell exactly how the person is responding to your words and therefore hard to tailor your little speech to the particlar patient's needs. It was also a bit frustrating because this patient kept interrupting me with questions during the first two minutes before I had even managed to lay out the basics but then after I was done she would ask no questions at all. I'm sure I didn't explain it that well, am I intimidating? Am I really stupid looking like if she asked questions I wouldn't know the answers anyway? Or did I manage to completely put her to sleep?

As a result of these two goings-on in my morning, I wasn't very well prepared for tele rounds and had nothing to contribute to them. In my defense, though, they did go through them really, really quickly so I had very little time for interjections.

The rest of the day, though, I think I did pretty well. Blinky was on tele earlier this week and she left me totally awesome notes to work from. I'm not sure if she's always so thorough or if she thinks I need all the extra help I can get (which I probably do), but it was really nice. So I thought it would be good of me to lay out equally thorough notes for the person who's following me on tele tomorrow. I think I did a fairly decent job of that. Thinking back, though, I think I may have only made one intervention all day, and that was adjusting an allopurinol dose for a patient's poor renal function. Wow, that really sucks. What a waste of a day! Oh well, at least I didn't come out of it feeling completely downtrodden like yesterday.

So the rest of the day I'm supposed to spend cleaning my apartment. I'm continually amazed by how trashed this place can get with only me here to mess it up. I guess the key is that there's only me here to clean it up too. And then tomorrow I'm off on another adventure!