It's 9:25p and I am definitely going to bed.

How in the world is it not noon yet??

Surgery Orientation, cont'd:
Apparently food service doesn't start until 7:30am. We have coffee and
fruit and bagels and pastries now.

6:15am - Surgery Orientation:
I can't believe they don't have coffee.

And how does that make you feel?

Yesterday they called in the bomb squad to the Phillies Stadium. I turned the news on at 5p and they had a view from the helicopter hovering overhead of the remote detonator robot getting ready to enter the stadium. Update on the 6p news: upon detonation, they discovered it was a case of hotdogs... they were the ones to be shot into the stands with a hotdog gun, so I guess they were technically ammunition.

Some things I learned during my psychiatry rotation:

Quitting "cold turkey" gets its name from the goosebumps you get when you come off heroin and other opioids.

"Hysteria" looks like "hysterectomy" because the Egyptians believed the former was caused by the uterus detaching and wandering the body in search of a source of moisture. Whenever it ended up latching on is when the woman developed symptoms.

It's easy to stay married for 50 years if you love the person.
(that one's from my 86 year old patient)

Tomorrow is the shelf exam and then my rotation is going to be over. I'm really going to miss it. I don't know if it was the work itself, my patients, or my awesome attendings, but going into psychiatry is a possibilty for me (geri-psych anyway).

Back to the books for tonight, then New York this weekend!

Sunset in Philadelphia

I'm sitting here using my iPhone as a flashlight because we have no
power. They were trimming the trees on my block today and a branch
fell and hit the transformer. I lit our fireplace candlabra and a
bunch of other tealights. This might be romantic if we didn't have
major exams over the next few days. Glen, fresh off night float, is
taking advantage of the near darkness by stealing a nap... disrupted
only by the gentle noises of giant machines eating huge tree trunks
and the soothing flashing orange lights of the PECO truck parked right
outside. Power outages really make me wish we didn't have an electric
stove.

Grumble grumble.

Procrastination Opportunity

This guy has some pretty cool toys/gadgets:

http://www.markysparkytoys.com/html/toys.html

The kids in my family will likely be getting Super Spinmallows for Christmas this year.

Important Observations

I just spent the latter part of my evening watching Legally Blonde 2
for the first time. I was somewhat surprised to find that it is a
terrible, God awful movie. The first one was surprisingly good for a
silly chick flick. This one featured gaping plot holes, recycled story
lines, ...I'm a little too sleepy to eloquently explain what was wrong
with this movie. I'll move on.

Ann Taylor lift on Walnut St should be open past 7pm on weekend
nights. That's the second time I've been escorted out of that place!

Must sleep... So much to write... Zzzzzz

If when getting handed your take-out bag, the girl says "single with
cheese," and you say, "no, without cheese," and she says, "oh yeah...
without cheese." you can be sure that when you finally open that
burger, there will be cheese on it.

I think I craved fast food because I've been watching so much tv
lately. That's because i've been home alone a lot and I like the
background noise. I think my blood vessels can take one wendy's
hamburger per year... Also, I did NOT get the "shakin' & bacon" combo
which is a bacon triple cheeseburger served with a milkshake and
french fries. I intended on not even getting one piece of cheese.
You'd be surprised how hard it is for them to hold that disgusting
orange goody cheese.

I used to buy 25 cent Winterfresh.

I don't chew a lot of gum. Tonight while on call I popped a piece of
gum in my mouth and was whisked back to George's, the stationary/candy
store near Hunter. Hollerback if you hear me ;-)

The Aly Brain Digest

My thoughts for the day:

When you ask someone to be your supportive friend in the audience on
Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, you're really saying, there isn't a
single topic of knowledge where I think you would be useful as my Call
A Friend lifeline.

The DMV on Market St is WAY more pleasant at 3:45pm than during
lunchtime. I got my married drivers license today! Tomorrow -- on to
the registrar.

The new FOX show Hole In The Wall is actually worth watching.

A little extra anti-psychotic medication goes a long way (I didn't get
called a whore today). As an aside, earlier in the week, an attending
physician recommended I take 0.5mg Haldol qd to get rid of my anxiety-
related hiccups.

This morning our neighbors' recycling was strewn all over the
sidewalk. It included several large empty condom boxes, and it was
sort of funny. Also, there's a not-for-profit organization that hires
formally homeless folks who want to get their lives back on track to
sweep up the debris leftover AFTER the garbage men come. Those guys
rock my socks.

I have to work 7:30a to midnight tomorrow and I'm not thrilled. But. I
think I'm going to ask one of my patients on Geri Psych to play cards
with me. By the way, in case you didn't know, getting old pretty much
sucks.

And, finally, I LOVE NY.

I thought I would try to write a little thing each fay but I don!t
know if it will work out.

Today one of my patients called me a whore. Well, wrote Whore to me
because she can't speak too well right now because she's too heavily
medicated for her schizophrenia... Or maybe not medicated enough.

Maybe she wasn't calling me a whore as much as having a written
outburst about whores.

Who knows. Either way I still have to go in tomorrow and try to talk
to her and assess how she's doing with no verbal communication and
this as what I'm getting through writing.

I need me some Z's!

Man, this was supposed to be the easy part of the rotation. I went in
at 8:45 this morning! It was great.
Then for the first time, someone decided that the students on the
geriatric floor should also have to attend the 7:30 morning report for
the general inpatient psych floor. Now I have to get up more than an
hour earlier to go listen to what happened overnight to patients I'm
not responsible for treating. THEN I get to go to the morning report
for the patients I AM treating right after that. Yay starting every
single day with two+ hours of meetings!

The up side is that maybe morning report will give us geriatric
students some exposure to the general stuff since we've had such
specialized training so far: three weeks of outpatient psych focused
on drug rehab before these three weeks of geri.

I was just so looking forward to sleeping until 7:15!