I was asked today if I was spending a lot of time on people's chests and just then realized how much more time- at least the intense, scary time with this new job is spent focusing on the place where the docs enter and exit the femoral artery.
No one has called it the "router rooter" treatment- but this is how it seems to me, sending a "snake" on up there for exploration and if required blockage removal.
Kind of, but not exactly, which is likely why no one else calls it that. There are tons of amazing things going on in medicine every day. There have been eons of clever, clever people researching and creating drugs and procedures so now people can do some way crazy amazing things.
For example: it used to be when a person came up from this heart catheterization thing pressure on this femoral artery was applied for hours (the person could not so much as lift their head for six hours.) I haven't seen the sand bags, but I've heard of them. I have seen the clamps they used to use to literally clamp people down to their beds.
Now with the invention of a tiny little patch full of a substance that chemically combines with a person's own blood to create a "plug" that doesn't obstruct the flow of blood inside the body, just to the outside, a person will stop bleeding within 30 minutes and can be allowed to sit up more or less within an hour- if everything works right, which doesn't always happen. Back to the plumbing analogy it seems not unlike attempting to work on a faucet when there's no way to turn off the water.
And here is where things get fairly interesting, for me at least- as clever and complex and so forth medicine is (the human body, too- no doubt), suddenly, out of no where, we're dealing with, duh . . . gravity! Or out of nowhere some of the same ideas used to get the last of the toothpaste out of the tube or make a soda explode when you open it or keep a sand castle just damp enough not to fall apart. It's a little startling the shifting back and forth from text book to playground physics.
Totally off the subject, I'm working in a teaching hospital and I can not believe how young these interns seem. They look like a bunch of third graders playing dress up in their doc outfits- and no disrespect or anything, but they say "cool!" and "Dude!" way too often.
Doogie Houser could be their grand daddy, I know how long ago that was- but I'm pretty sure, even with his squeaky voice cracking all over the place, he never said "awesome!"
I'm going to stop now- except one more thing. I'm not keeping up with news/politics now in the same demented, tortured way so I was just curious- how did that Israeli move out thing come about? Did something specific happen? Or no?
I remember the fall of the Berlin wall and the fall of the Soviet Union as well- way back before the internets, back when foreign countries seemed way too complicated to keep up with, which they still are, but I have no social life so it works out.
I remember those two things seemed to come out of no where. It was like . . . . "worry, angst, strife, fear, no hope, no hope, no hope" and then out of nowhere "ahhhh, well okay".
