hypocaffeinemia

Quite independently, without any prodding from me, it seems both my wife and my brother have started their own blogs today. I wish them the best of luck — it is an excellent medium to share thoughts with family, friends, and the world. My wife’s blog is BabyDayze and my brother’s is blog.nickmcc.com.

Coincidentally or not, they’re both running an installation of wordpress off my server. 

I’ve added OpenID support to the blog. Dunno if it will ever take off, but it’s a nice goal, so I thought I’d support it. Feel free to use your OpenID account to login here. If you don’t know what OpenID is, go look it up!

So it doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure out that ever since Hurricane Ike my frequency of blogging has decreased significantly. Nothing like a three-week stretch without power to break a habit, I guess. 

Anywho, my penultimate semester is now complete and once more I’m feeling the itch to tell random strangers on the intertubes about what I think. I’ve (finally) updated wordpress and adopted a ?temporary? new theme as the old one, stylin’ as it was, didn’t make the grade in the compatibility department. I realized I had about 80 thousand categories, so I cleaned them up a bit, too. Sometimes it’s more fun to do the technical stuff behind the scenes then to write, but I digress. 

Expect to hear more from me, whether you like it or not, over the coming weeks. I can’t promise I’ll be super active once the next semester gets going, but I may just try a hypocaffeinemia challenge™ : run 3 miles and blog once a day for an entire year. We’ll see how well that goes: the hurricane gave me the excuse I need to break my running habit as well.

One of the most frequent comments I receive, both online and in real life from my instructors, peers, and other acquaintances, is “Why didn’t you go to medical school?”

It’s a hard one to answer, for sure. For starters, the question implies that my current choices are somehow inferior and that I’m limiting my potential. I won’t get into this aspect as it’s hashed out daily in all the nurse v. doctor threads at allnurses.com, studentdoctor.net, and elsewhere.

It’s Monday morning and I’m back to work. From now until the break at the end of the semester I am working every weekend. Fun. I’m actually looking forward to it for some reason– I’ve become quite bored this summer on my days off and while I will likely regret saying this, I love being occupied with work and school. At least this semester my clinicals are in the ER and the ICU instead of med/surg.

*****

Anyways, our hospital has been on penny-pinching mode recently concurrent with the expansion under construction, so last night they pulled a fast one on some unsuspecting patients by moving three of them to the ICU in order to shut one of the telemetry units down to save on staffing. Unfortunately, the powers that be didn’t think their cunning plan all the way through. Our ICU became short of beds with all these downgrades taking up valuable real estate, so shortly afterwards the previously closed unit had to reopen its doors in order to take ER admits and yes… recieve the three telemetry patients back from the ICU. Aside from how rushed the staff must have been, I can’t help but to feel for the poor patients who were transferred to and fro like a hot potato all night just to save the hospital a buck. Such boneheaded moves surely can’t reflect well on the press-ganey our hospital supposedly values so much.

…Is what I’d say if I were starting an epic novel. Instead, I’m merely starting a blog out of a combination of boredom mixed with intrigue. I don’t have much to say at the moment as things are currently in a bit of a doldrum (notice how I avoided saying the q word) at work and school doesn’t start up until the end of the month.

Anyways, I’m currently participating in several forums including allnurses.com in my spare time, attempting the impossible goal of combating ignorance (and associated bliss) as well as honing my skills at rectocraniectomies.

Until next time,

Matt