Pop goes the weasle

Karie had a baby. Tell your wives. 12/12/07. We made it to the hospital at 3:00 am the baby was out at 3:30 am. No time for the epidural. It was a girl. Amelia. She was in the NICU for the first few hours for an irregular heart beat. But now all is well. Have a Merry Christmas. I get a week off for Christmas, and then go q2 the next week. It is so worth it though. I plan on a lot of skiing.

Our Christmas Card

Hello,

Merry Christmas from Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh, PA to be exact. Dave was forced to get a job so here we are. We have been here since June and are having a great time. The girls were excited to start a new adventure. Actually, adventure is a good word to describe our year, and we will just leave it at that.
Elisha is getting the house put together and doing a fantastic job. She is busy being the Mom to our three girls and a cheerleader for me. She is also busy with her calling at church.
Josie started two new things this year. 4th grade and the saxophone. We get concerts all the time, we are so lucky. She is growing up even though we tell her stop. Great at being a big sister and working on her Faith in God award.
Savannah started 1st grade. Also great at being a big sister and loves school. After her first day she came home and said, “It was the best day of her life”. She gets to ride the bus. You cannot ask for anything more.
Kate is now two almost three and still controls our lives. She helps out in Nursery, so the other kids will stop crying, she says it really hurts her ears. If they do not stop crying she will stare at them for a minute and then ask them, “what’s your problem?” We anticipate a degree in Psychology.
We love and miss you all. If you are east of the Mississippi please stop by. We hope you have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

Love,

Dave, Elisha, Josie, Savannah, & Kate
That’s right; I am surrounded by beautiful women.

Intubation vacation, as I like to call it

After 2 gruelling months of trauma, it's nice to have a change of pace. I call it my intubation vacation, b/c all I have to do is show up in the OR just after the bolus of Diprivan has been given, insert a Mac 3 blade, then watch myself pass the ETT past the vocal cords. At that point, I thank the anesthesiologist and nurse anesthetist, grab a sticker, and walk to the next room. It's a pretty nice rotation--no charting, no assigned call, no rounding, just looking for 80 intubations. I'll echo your comment to me, Caywood, I can see why all you anesthesiologists have chosen your specialty. That being said, I think I would miss the variety offered in the ED, so I'm still glad to be where I am.

Trauma for me was being alone in the hospital with 48 patients on the floor and 13 admissions overnight. My highest admission night was 17. Of course, by sheer numbers, if you have 48 patients on the floor and 13 new ones coming in, you're bound to get a few (okay, a LOT of) floor calls.

Oh, yeah, and since my schedule's a little lighter this month, I signed up for 7 paid/"moonlighting" call shifts--just in time for Christmas. Nothing like working a 26-hour shift and making as much as you did in the past 2 weeks.

my 2 cents about ER

after completing my ER month i can see how you could want to do emergency medicine ken. so far it was the best month of my intern year. i worked 18 12-hour shifts and was actually home enough for maggie to get sick of me. once i had three days off then worked two night shifts but it was really slow and got sent home before 02:00 both nights and then had 3 more days off, so i actually had 8 days off in a row. now i know how you feel every week andersen. it wasn't nearly as great as anesthesia will be, but i have to say you picked a pretty good specialty ken. this was much better than my month at maricopa. what probably made it so great was nobody really cared how hard i worked so i would carry about 1-3 patients at a time and would go the whole 12 hour shift only seeing about 6 patients total and tried to avoid as much as possible the rectal bleeding or a woman with abdominal pain. off the topic, but have any of you surgery guys realized yet that surgery is not a lifestyle specialty and decided to switch to anesthesia.