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.