before seeing any patient at the emergency department, we usually take a quick peek at the triage nurse’s notes. her job is to see the patient, and allocate him her or it a tag that indicates the urgency of the case, and it includes a little comment about the presenting complaint. for example, “SOB x 2/7″ does not mean son of a bitch multiply by two sevenths, it means short of breath for two days. sometimes we see dumb ones like, “headache x 1 year”, “nightmares x 3/7″ or “complain whole body ache x 6/12″.

but today i saw an amusing one that i just had to see the patient. the triage notes read, “fell into drain, talking++”. and i regretted. turned out this poor schizophrenic fell into a drain and hurt his leg, but was talking about everything under the sun from his dentures to his theories on why the pyramids are triangular to the dirt on his cat’s left paw. everything but his broken foot. no point to this story. just my daily amusement to feed my blog. fun for the whole family finger licking good.

love the rain. people dont seem to bother popping by the hospital when it rains. apparently rain cures all moans, groans and aching bones. but when the rain stops, all hell breaks loose and i find myself moaning, groaning and having aching bones because the moans, groans and aching bones of everyone else reappear and they flock to the hospital like irritating ants to half eaten candy. boo hoo.

in other news, i managed to catch happy feet last night. and, i hate to admit this, i think baby mumbles is fucking cute. so fucking cute. i’m swearing a little there to mask my feminine side of describing anything remotely fluffy as cute. i’m not usually like this, really. but seriously, isn’t he one cute little bugger? really. googled emperor penguin chicks and am even more amazed to find out that real emperor penguin chicks do look every bit of fluff like baby mumbles. this seems obvious, but here i am assuming that his cuteness is exaggerated by hollywood. apparently not. baby mumbles, so bloody fucking cute. there’s a message aching to be told in the movie, but i’m distracted by baby mumbles. fucking cute . a lolly for anyone who can get me one for christmas.

www.emperor-penguin.com

 sharing the love there folks.

the first thing that a majority of patients ask me when they first set their beady eyes on me is not, “ive got this cough….”, or “ive got this smelly discharge and itch in my…”. instead, they’d ask me what the hell i am or who the hell i am. id buy the sweepstakes lottery and dance to the macarena in my pink tutu if i go through a day without a patient doubting my identity. and its not only patients, the hawker centers are also notorious. almost everyone calls me xiao di di (little boy) when asking for my order. boo hoo.

i used not to mind that i look like a juvenile of sorts. but it’s getting very tiring having to explain myself to patients and their relatives. yes i am over eighteen, yes i have a medical degree, and yes i have pubic hair. sometimes they request to be seen by a senior looking doctor, and i am more than happy to comply. usually i’d just grab another fellow medical officer to masquerade as someone “senior” because well, they look older. i’d be damned if i came begging to my senior consultant to take a look at one of my patients just because they said i looked young, and they doubted my abilities.

so ends a frustrating day at work.

managed to catch the new bond flick today, and was rather impressed by it. it deviated a little from the usual bond-fare. no more escaping from factories/castles/submarines/desert palaces/dams/zoos with time limits set by big fat red self-desctruct buttons activated by the big fat fingers of big fat villains. no more Q. no more gadgets. no more beefed up aston martins. no more bikini clad bimbo bond girl. bond doesnt seem to care about how his martini should be served and bond actually says i love you. but despite elimination of these bond cliches, it was rather enjoyable. there was even a hint of a sequel, or least i thought there was, and i cannot wait.

i cannot help it. the medical half of me is just itching to comment about the scene where bond got poisoned. there is no way in hell anyone would look like that in ventricular tachycardia, and there is no way any doctor in their right mind would say ventricular tachycardia when he sees one (he’ll just say vt, or vf) and there is no way that ecg reading was vf/vt.

 phew.

 got it off my chest.

 yay. fun for the whole family, finger licking good.

finally had the chance to sink my teeth into the infamous wagyu beef, a variant of kobe beef. and good lord, it was heavenly. if i died today, i’d die a rather happy camper. only complaint was that it was a mere 200g. give me a break, my right testicle is heavier than that! but i guess too much of a good thing can kill you, in one way or another. or so they say. had every intention to pepper my little bloggie with more pictures, especially pictures of my little gastronomic adventure today, but alas, the camera’s battery is rather dead. boo hoo.

visited a friend in the hospital today. she suffered horrendous injuries from head to toe and she’d do well in a fancy dress party, what with all those metal rods sticking out from her every nook and cranny. external fixators are as fun as condoms with holes, you just dont want to have anything to do with them. but the amazing thing is that she has managed to keep her pelvic external fixators a secret from her poor grandmother. a well positioned blanket has its merits apparently. why she wouldnt let her grandmother have a peek at the mother of all external fixators is beyond me. how cruel of her to deprive an old lady of the wonders of orthopedic contraptions. anyhow, she’s doing well, albeit a little panda eyed. boo hoo.

  

i like this idea of shift work. just eight hours of intense work a day, keeps me pretty as happy as a lark. and im getting a renewed sense of satisfaction with work these days, a little overwhelming though. we see all kinds of toms dicks harrys ah kows and ah meis in the emergency department, and just by sheer numbers, i sometimes wonder how a small country like singapore can have so many people. dont they have lives to lead rather than pop by the hospital with minor ailments? im going to take work a little more seriously now, perhaps sucking a little cock here and there, cand carrying some balls here and there. thats the sad truth if we want to impress, and i do want to impress because emergency medicine is a very potential career choice for me. yay. go me.

 *cue yet more pom pom girls chanting my name in orgasmic tones*

friday night. bored and lonely. boo hoo. and im actually looking forward to working over the weekend. even thinking of starting my shift a little earlier and finishing a little later so that i have something to keep myself occupied, how pathologically depressing is that?

hmmm. cannot believe i was initially having difficulty navigating around itunes and my ipod. thought its supposed to be so user friendly that even blind donkeys with lobectomies could figure it out in seconds. but i managed to overcome it after some time though. yay. go me.

*cue pom pom girls chanting my name in orgasmic tones*