Pink Elephants

I suppose that if one were to stay up late on a worknight polishing off a bottle of wine with a coworker and watching a chick flick, one would have some serious bad karma coming their way the next morning.

Perhaps that explains the SEVEN patients that showed up this morning needing the next dose in their rabies vaccination series. Not that it was hard work, just a TREMENDOUS amount of paperwork. The patients had found a bat in their home. Since they crushed it's widdle head when they captured it, it couldn't be studied for rabies. No negative testing, means no certainty; which means a five-shot prophylactic series over the course a couple weeks for everyone involved.

Then there was the laceration guy. Every time I cleaned this guy up, I found a new laceration that needed repairing. I had a medical student with me, so I would do the more challenging parts, lining up jagged edges and such, and then supervised her stitching up the straight parts. Finally, just as we were getting ready to discharge him, his mother pointed out a HUGE scalp laceration we had missed. It was so embarassing. I had examined his head when I cleared him from the spine board. I didn't feel any lumps or bumps, painful areas, and there was no blood on my gloves. I guess his thick, lustrous hair hid it from me. Finally, I numbed him up, stapled, and sent him on his way. By the time I finished my dictations, it was two hours past my shift. And to think that this morning, the chief resident was giving me and my fellow intern a hard time about having an empty department! I don't know where my day went, but there were certainly no lunch, or even bathroom breaks.

Today was the end of my pediatric emergency block. I start a surgery rotation on Monday, so I'm planning on catching up on my sleep and maybe doing some stuff around the house this weekend.