boredom is a chronic disease

I really should be cleaning the house. There's a whole list of stuff I need to do this weekend while the kids are gone, but I mostly find myself staring at my computer screen or blankly off into space. Sometimes I come out of it long enough to dab at the drool collecting in the corner of my open mouth with my shirt sleeve.

Night shift is getting to me.

Spent Friday with MixMan getting a CT scan and then fighting with the MRI tech about what test he was doing. . .he insisted on a full brain scan: 40 minutes in the imager with an IV for contrast for an 8 year old OCD deaf kid afraid of needles? HA! and I tried to tell him this wasn't for a diagnostic, it was specifically for the surgeon to be able to see the inner auditory canal, or IAC, for placement of the cochlear implant. I pointed that out to him on the order sheet from MixMan's PCP: "MRI IAC." and this is what he said:

"I've done brain MRI's on lots of deaf people. And I'm sure many of them have gone on to have cochlear implants."

Whaaaat?

Had a pretty good stretch at work this last weekend. Several drunks with head injuries, shocker there, eh? One of them apparently slipped on some peanuts at the Roadhouse and smacked her head on a table. Medics brought her in, she kept insisting she had a right to refuse treatment because of her religion, paganism. umm. okay. She loved the boys, though- the security guard, the CT tech, the 60 year old male nurse. Oh, yes. But anytime one of us girls would walk by her room, she'd yank the pressure bandage off her head, wave her arms around, scream, threaten to sue, and then start spurting blood in wide arcs from the little arteries she'd sliced open in her scalp. When we finally sedated her enough to suture, I had to hold a flashlight above the lac so the doc could sew, since our portable light in the psych room wasn't good enough. With the flashlight, and the blood everywhere, I kept thinking I heard choppers and the theme music to MASH playing somewhere outside the room.

My favorite patient was the LOL who came in from a nursing home, hx of CVA with right sided deficits, with sudden unexplained weakness in her left arm. CPHSS was normal otherwise. Staff said she was somewhat unresponsive and not her usual self. Excuse me, but if I'm not working, I'm usually somewhat unresponsive at 0300, too. Sheeesssh. But she's all dressed up, hat on at a jaunty angle, mardi gras beads around her neck, and I asked her if she got all gussied up just to come to the hospital. "Nope," she says. "I always dress like this." I find this rather curious, ask her what jammies she wears to bed. "I don't wear jammies. I like to be ready."

I'm a little confused by now, and I'm pulling off her hat, and glasses, and beads, and fuzzy sweater, and button up shirt, and tank top, and thinking of all the possibilities of what she could be ready for, this little old lady from a nursing home. So finally, I ask. And she says, "whatever might happen!! you never know when somebody is going to ask you to go dancing."

Well. She has a point.