Birthdays are cool

Thank you :)

UK

A little far back but a great game all the same :) Go Big Blue!!!!!!

Late Sunday Night

Hot tea and a game of phase 10 (dice style).

Miss Molly and a Brain Tumor

This is Miss Molly a 6 and a half MONTH old english mastiff that felt like crawling on my lap the other day. She's lovely but rather heavy. Other than Annie she's my favorite dog right now ... sorry Jackson, my love for you is hit or miss and completely dependent on whether my shoes have slobber on them.

I had a 30 year old woman w/ a brain tumor come in to the ER the other day. She had a H/A and ended up getting a craniotomy and most of her R frontal brain removed. She has 3 kids. It's likely cancerous but we removed a lot ... I mean a lot of brain tissue ... so hopefully she has a chance for a good 5-10 years. She was so nice and she looked really good w/ a shaved head. You could see her fear though, always there in her eyes. I took her staples out yesterday and she looked happy. I'm glad she's optimistic, that's the best way to be in this kind of situation. It makes you think about family and wonder at how lucky we all are to be healthy, how precious that is.

Tuesday night

It's only Tuesday night. If only it were the weekend and I could sleep in tomorrow. Sometimes it is just hard to breathe. I should probably fold laundry tonight but I won't. My grandmother would shoot me to the moon if she saw my wrinkled clothes.

Continue

I have been told to continue. I suppose since I no longer grace the walls of facebook this will be my last online connection. So to all of you family and friends, I will continue. And if perhaps you are some stranger browsing ... hi.


Last night I dreamed of surgery. It's only natural when you spend most of your day staring into a  body cavity. Even though I do neurosurgery I still dream like it is vascular. It's always the blood. Wait, that's not true. Dying brain tissue tends to be quite memorable.

 I was called in around 9 for a spinal tumor. It pushed against her spinal cord and she had slowly become paralyzed from the waist down over the past 3 days. We went in knowing it was probably malignant and sadly it was. Hopefully she'll regain some of her function though.

She was a Jehovah's witness and had refused any blood transfusion. Will someone please remind me why these people are willing to die to not receive another humans blood? I almost think that they don't understand what they are really saying. I wonder if they saw their own blood pooling in the canister next to them they might reconsider. She even refused a cell saver (a machine that allows us to collect their own blood during surgery to give it back later if they need it). She was probably right to do so with the tumor being cancerous. We could have spread it everywhere.

That being said, the surgery is always a little bit more tense knowing you don't have a back up plan. I think they bleed more but maybe that's just a mental game.

The surgery went well and I got home after midnight. My dream was filled w/ the pumping of blood, the urgency, and the sense that all was lost.

How melodramatic I know.

factory farms

Only after the last tree is cut down,
the last of the water poisoned,
the last animal destroyed,
only then will you realize that you cannot eat money

-Cree Indian Prophecy

fluff

There are days when all you need is a spoon, peanut butter and fluff.