| 42 weeks |
[Mar. 3rd, 2009|01:08 pm] |
According to LJ, I haven't been around for 42 weeks. My how time flies.
Let's see. In the last 42 weeks I have been working a surgery job with full on slavery hours and I have no access to computers most of the time. Nothing really interesting to say about that.
Have been seeing/practically living with a fellow for the last six months. While there may be some interesting things to say about that, relationships are like dreams -- they are only really interesting to the people who are in them.
Is anybody still around?
echo echo. |
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| mother's day phonecall |
[May. 11th, 2008|01:43 pm] |
My mom told me a story I haven't heard before. How it came up on a mother's day phone call is difficult to explain, but the way our relationship has evolved, we were able to have a good laugh about it.
A story I had never heard before about my evil stepfather:
He had a bullet wound. When my mom asked him how that happened, he went on to tell of his gunslinging heroics back in the Phillipines, where his family was a wealthy criminal syndicate of some sort. When he was a medical student working in a hospital a woman came in who he liked. She was real pretty. Mom doesn't remember if she was in after a miscarriage or for an elective abortion, but whatever the details her medical situation marked her as a bad girl. So he decided to kidnap her and have her for his own. That's right. Kidnap her. He took her from the hospital to some kind of shack he kept on his plantations. He enlisted some goons to guard the place to make sure she didn't get away. This went on for some time, the fun shack.
This is where, back in the 70's, my mom's face apparently went from attracted to this rich fuck's rough and tumble past to a little bit concerned to appalled and possible frightened. So she says here's where the story gets vague. He only told this story once, starting out bragging and then trying to soften the impact in response to her reaction. Then he refused to answer questions about it ever again.
So after that it's unclear. But her family eventually pieced together what happened and sent in some men to get her back. There was a gun battle and he got shot and they got a ruined girl he didn't want anymore anyway.
This is the man she married and moved into the house with her children.
Yet she is somehow able to tell this story in a way that's kind of funny. It's a gift. I can't do it because I just learned this story and it won't be funny for me for another 10 years or so. It has to ripen. But then it will be a real crowd pleaser. The angle is the naive southern belle being wooed by the most god-awful base that ever was played, and trying to be polite about it. All you need is an angle, plus time.
We had a good laugh.
Happy mother's day. |
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| The other woman |
[May. 6th, 2008|10:18 am] |
I haven't posted on this subject in a long time because it really hasn't been on my mind.
Trigger: Last week I was on a date in a random middle-of-the-road restaurant in Santa Monica. I was late and my date was already at the table when I came. It took a few minutes for me to settle in. But when I did I saw that at the next table was my ex's ex, a very pretty petite thing who happens to be the star of a big CBS TV show. She was close enough I could have poked out her eye. We ignored each other all night. Didn't speak or make eye contact. We never liked each other.
Payoff: I had this dream last night that this ex's ex and I ran into each other randomly and we were still annoyed and mistrustful. In the dream we were standing next to each other and pretending not to see each other, like in the restaurant. But then a monster approached. A genuine dream monster with fur and fangs. And we had to speak. We were cornered. I was like, "What are we going to do? I'm scared." She looked at me with scorn, all 5 foot tall, 100 pounds of powder puff barbie and she said to me contemptuously, "You know, Anne. It's just basic physics that power is a function of size and speed. We're both pretty small, so we're going to have to run at it as fast as we can and try to knock it down." I was all "Fuck that. I'm waiting right here and hoping it goes away." She handed me her purse and took off running, jumped in the air and landed on the monster shoulder height, knocking it to the ground. Then she kicked the life out of it with her stilletto heals.
She and I had a long antagonistic history. Briefly, I was dating him, not at all seriously for about a year and he dumped me for her. Casting couch situation, those were giddy days. For two years they were together. He and I barely spoke. Then we did start speaking, and flirting, and he dumped her and we were back together, not seriously at first and always mistrustfully. He wanted to keep our relationship secret at first because he didn't want to hurt her. She was very "fragile" and "depressed" and by all accounts still in love with him. She had this rule whereby if ever the 3 of us were going to the same place she had to go with him and I had to go alone, and he and I would meet up afterwards. Because she was a southern "lady" who couldn't attend an event without a man and she would be devastated and lonely if he wouldn't escort her. And besides, he said, everybody, including her, knew that he was really with me. She was the pathetic one, always on the arm of somebody else's date. Eventually, way too late I put my foot down and said no more of that. He goes with me, or I don't go at all and it's over. This worked for one party. Then the very next party to come around, his friend's birthday, he comes with her. I didn't even know she would come because this friend hated her anyway. But there they were and he was sheepishly avoiding the issue and complaining of back pain and wanting to leave early. I left the party before him. Called him in the morning and said we were over, I'm quitting couples counseling, and I thought he should continuing counseling on his own because he needs it.
He didn't ask and probably doesn't know (or care) to this day why I broke up with him.
I didn't know at the time that he had a girlfriend in NY. Or about any of the other lies he had been telling me, including the very high likelihood that the actress had never been "fragile" or "depressed" and had in fact had no idea whatsoever of our relationship at any point and everything was always his idea. He just liked being seen with the trophy babe. And he liked manipulating the both of us to gratify his own ego.
I've always felt a little guilty over the years for believing all the things he said to make me feel ill about her. Maybe she never deserved it. We never got along and were always very catty to each other. All because of lies he whipped up about each of us to the other, which prevented our being able to treat each other with respect. I think culturally, there's a big problem with women fighting with each other over problems for which men are to blame. And I hate that I fell for that old trick. The problem is almost never "the other woman." It's the monster. |
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| G-Man |
[Apr. 26th, 2008|07:11 am] |
I was in the lunchroom at the hospital the other day. It's like high school. All the cool doctors sit together and talk about doctor things -- their kids' Ivy league/med school prospects, the stock market, how the democrats are plotting to destroy the world. The seats with the popular crowd were all taken so I sat at the far end of the table where I couldn't even see the TV (Always set to Fox News or ESPN anyway). Across from me was a tiny, elderly Asian doctor I'd never seen before. He introduced himself and told me he was a pathologist here for a cancer consult. Thats what he does to relax, he says, in a very heavy accent. What he really does, he went on to say, is work for the FBI solving crimes and worrying about bioterrorism.
What he's worried about nowadays is the idea of a bioterrorist suicide bomber. Somebody who injects himself with a horrible, deadly airborne disease and rides around on airplanes in America until he dies. There's no way to stop that at the gate he says. Nothing to carry but yourself. You can do this naked. He's investigated lots of suspected cases of this. He thinks it's so easy to do it's just a matter of time. Remember how freaked out and angry everybody was when that ass with untreatable TB flew around on his honeymoon? It's that easy.
I need to get a country house so when the plague comes I can go there with my closest friends and have a masked ball or tell dirty stories while the world around us dies.
Next he told me the story of one of his favorite cases. He said a hiker found some scattered remains out in the hills somewhere around Los Angeles. The bones were eaten clean by animals, chewed up and spread around, then bleached by the sun. They gathered what they could find and rebuilt the skeleton. At first glance, he could tell it was a young Asian woman, he said. Race, gender, approximate age, is easy. Then they did some studies of her teeth and compare against a database and discovered her teeth were mineralized with a very specific ratio of minerals that suggested she could only be from one place in the world where the drinking water was over saturated with such things. They did one of those computer models of her face based on what was left of her skull and sent it to the authorities in a tiny city somewhere in Cambodia or something. They immediately recognized the girl as somebody who had gone to America to meet a "boyfriend" and never been heard of again.
The family had the name of the guy. He was the killer, it turned out. They found enough evidence to convict him. Amazing! That such a database exists is very exciting to me. In a country where there is no federal database of missing children or salvaged cars or across state border cooperation on child support. That this department got it together to do a database of the mineral content of drinking water everywhere in the world, and put it to good use makes me very happy.
I countered with my equally amazing, but totally depressing story from my morgue rotation. A perfectly healthy forty-ish man was found dead in his locked apartment with no marks on his body. He was slated to testify against some huge corporation in some horrible corporate malfeasance scandal. He had the testimony that was going to bring them down. He had no history of mental illness or abnormal paranoia. But suddenly he was getting weird threats, he was being watched. He wrote all this down and discussed it with his friends and family. There was a letter to the effect of, "If I am found dead, this corporation did it." He became a shut-in. Lots of locks on the door. Afraid of his own shadow. Autopsy came back absolutely negative. No hidden aneurysms or anything natural like that. They ran toxicology scans and found nothing. But here's the thing, the world is so full of poisons that unless you use an obvious one, they can't find it. They did a scan for trace metals. No abnormal metals. That would take care of your standard arsenics and rat poisons. They couldn't find a thing. They ended up deciding to preserve tissue samples from all over the body. That way if the police came to them and told them exactly what they were looking for they could find it. But if nobody ever tells them, they can't find it. By the time I left the cause of death was unknown. Police can't work forever on a case that they're not even sure is murder. So they got away with it. And it wasn't even that hard.
The G-man thinks he could have figured it out. He says the FBI in LA has the best pathology department in the world. They figure things out. They ride around with flashing lights and FBI vests, he told me. "Oh yes, that was my favorite thing when I worked for the morgue," I told him. We drove on the sidewalks if we wanted to. Policemen parted like the red sea when we approached a crime scene. Yes, he likes that part too. It never gets old.
So that was my G-man. We said goodbye. He asked me my name, shook my hand. "Call me Mike," he said, "very nice to meet you." And he shuffled away, frail and small. If he'd looked back I'd have followed him. |
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| Stories people tell to get laid |
[Mar. 16th, 2008|08:22 am] |
I've done a lot of dating in the last few years, since the last big breakup. It's not all bad. One thing I've noticed is that most guys have an anecdote in their back pocket that they use when the date is lagging, or when it's going well and they want to slug it home. I'm sure women have them too. I'm sure I have them. But I used them more when I was younger. I'm bored with my own stories and I don't tell them much anymore. I listen instead. I've decided to collect my favorite spontaneous personal revelations. Please share yours if you got 'em. I will start with this one:
There was a guy I was dating last fall. He was tall and handsome and he did interesting work. He tracked earthquakes. He is a physicist type who builds sensors and buries them in the ground all over California. Mostly in the desert, but also in industrial basements and underground tunnels in urban areas. He works with shovels, lasers, welding torches, computers, sunscreen. There was never much chemistry between us, but I thought his job was super sexy and I totally romanticized the sweaty scientist digging in the mud thing. All ripply and hot.
Alas, he wasn't much for conversation. Not terribly verbal or clever in that way. Tired insights. Couldn't tell a story. No sense of rhythm, scale or distance. He never read books. Couldn't remember a book he'd ever read, but he had bought a few. Mostly non-fiction. Just as I was losing interest, he came up with this one, a tale that transcends the telling.
The digger's father was a stern cold man who never much got children. Didn't like them or dislike them, just expected them to be more obedient, still and clean than they were capable of being. He was not a man you talked back to. But the digger loved him and wanted and wants to this day nothing more than to connect with his father in some real way. One evening when he was about 7, his dad was driving them around in the family car, I picture an Oldsmobile. They weren't talking, as usual. The kid was doing kid things, lolling his head about, fidgeting, looking out the window, he doesn't remember what specifically. When he saw something out of the corner of his eye and looked up just in time to see what he thought was a homeless person dressed in rags step in front of the car. He heard a thud and rumble and saw the shadowy figure thrown clear. His dad sped up, saying nothing. The kid knew better than to say anything. His dad would say something, he expected, in good time. Would go back and check if he'd hurt the person. But they went on home, in silence. Had some dinner. He listened attentively for a few days, waiting to see if his dad would say something to his mom, or watching for a change in the atmosphere in the house, a sign of guilt or concern. He skimmed the paper every day, looking for articles about a hit and run, but didn't find any. There was nothing. Nothing changed in the house. He kept it to himself, a secret between him and his dad. A bonding thing. His dad had killed someone and didn't care. It made him fear, and respect, him all the more.
A few years ago he asked his dad about it. About that night he'd run over the homeless person. His dad said it never happened. Nothing like that ever happened. He didn't get excited. He didn't get defensive. Just the same flat reason he'd always had. "no, you must have been mistaken." So now this secret he's carried his whole life is something else. Evidence of insanity? Some kind of metaphor? He doesn't know. Sometimes in the daylight he thinks he imagined the whole thing. But it was so real for so many years, he can't be certain. Most of the time, especially when he drinks or feels lonely or down, he knows it's because his dad is a murderer, and only he knows.
Yeah. He got laid. |
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| students |
[Feb. 9th, 2008|05:30 pm] |
We have PA students where I work. I remember when I was a PA student, lo these two years ago, and I remember working my butt off. It's like being a serf. You just keep moving, do what you're told and do it quickly. I also spent a lot of time reading about whatever discipline I was rotating through. Where I went, in NY, they do a lot of "pimping" which wierdly enough is what medical students call it when the doctor asks a lot of questions which you are expected to know. You have to be on your toes.
Well these California PA students are a whole nother breed. The last two struck me as just plain lazy and totally indifferent to what's going on. I guess they didn't want to go into surgery in the first place and this is not going to be their favorite rotation, but we're cutting off a man's leg here, so show some enthusiasm. We roto-rooter the carotids, we patch the aorta, we reroute the normal tracks of the arteries and veins and sew them together again in exciting new ways. Stick with me and you will invariably get splashed in the face with lots of blood. You're wearing a plastic mask so the typical reaction is to startle and giggle. What's not to like?
But even if you don't like it, I think you should at least make an effort to ask some questions, show up on time, try to jump in there and be a little bit active in the surgery. Sop some blood, cut some string. No cowering.
The current PA student will ask questions like, "Are you in the lunchroom yet?" "How long will it take me to get from this hospital to the office? Is it really mandatory that I do rounds with you?" She will call me on my cell phone to ask questions such as these. I wish I hadn't given her my number. I am a busy person with no time for questions like those. It's so alien to my mindset of what a medical rotation is supposed to be like, I just don't know what to do with her.
My boss is really nice. Everybody gets good grades. But still. It seems like they are sleeping through a great opportunity to learn something kind of exciting. I don't get why these people want to go into medicine in the first place. Money I suppose. Job security maybe. No better ideas, most likely. |
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| butt flash |
[Jan. 31st, 2008|09:38 am] |
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I was walking in the OR racetrack the other day and came up behind a young black man carrying a mop head. He was wearing his scrubs tied around his upper thighs so his butt was hanging out. I thought this was really funny because 1) scrubs are drawstring, huge pants. So it's not about the size, it's about where you choose to tie them. So this was a decision. I choose to tie mine around my ribs because even the small size is so gigantic that they drag on the floor if I don't. 2) The OR is a bastion of conformity. There's a red line at the door of the racetrack which opens to 18 rooms. When you cross that line you have to be wearing scrubs of exactly the right shade blue, a hat, and possibly shoe covers. You are not allowed to even wear a jacket, even though it is freezing cold. If you try (and I do) somebody will invariably call you on it and you have to apologize and pretend you don't know any better. 3) I can't believe that style is still going. I thought it was funny in the first place. |
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| Fixed |
[Jan. 18th, 2008|08:28 am] |
For LA trail people: First of all, I am happy to report that i found a running loop in griffith park that has eluded me for about a decade now. It's the trail up Bronson, the ex and I referred to it as the "Indian Jones trail" because there's a place you can grab a rope and swing across a river. But then you come to a wide long trail that goes to the Hollywood sign, even though there are signs everywhere saying it doesn't because they don't want tourists up there in Bronson Canyon. Anyway we searched and searched for a loop but never found one. Fork to the right, go down the skinny trail by the water tower, then Viola you are at a steep hill that brings you down to the Bat Cave. That's right, the Bat Cave from the Adam West Batman series. Which is right off the parking lot but I never found it before. Now it is a dog park. If any of you come here I will take you there. But the dog park is why I am posting.
My running dog is not fixed. It takes dog park people about 30 seconds to figure that out. Because whatever alpha dog they have goes nuts. Literally. So they start lecturing you and shoo you out of the dog park. Waco would love to play with the dogs but he is not allowed, on account of having nuts. My position on this is chop off the nuts for goodness sake. He's never going to have sex anyway. His owner, however feels like that is cruel and unusual punishment and it takes the animal out of the animal. Why have a dog if you are only going to want to surgically remove his personality and make a Stepford dog. He feels very strongly about this. Even though his dog will now probably get prostate cancer and is not allowed to play with other dogs. And we can only imagine thinks about sex all the time but will never have it and doesn't it have the means to masturbate. Torture!
Tellingly, he does not feel this way about female dogs. He is OK with fixing them because he doesn't believe female reproductive organs have anything to do with personality. This to me is both sexist and ironic, because women spend their whole lives getting flack for personality changes related to their hormonal cycles. Can't be president because in a fit of hotflashes or PMS will send out the bombs. I've actually heard doctors say that about Hillary. You know a lot of bumfucks in truckstops believe this to be true. It's a funny idea to me that this guy, and apparently other guys he talks to who are pro-dogballs feel this way about bitches. Gets to the heart of the matter somehow, but that's another post I'm never going to write. It writes itself really.
An interesting point my friend makes, however, is that he thinks fixing male dogs is rascist. The argument goes that whenever all these white upper-middle class people and their fancy dogs run around dogparks which are mostly in expensive neighborhoods with lots of green space to spare, and are notorious for having their own social pecking orders among people and dogs, whenever these people get together and bitch about unspayed animals what they are secretly bitching about in their heart of hearts is Latinos and blacks who are breeding in a sloppy out of control way and encroaching on their neighborhoods, their parks, etc. He says if you look at where the unspayed animals are coming from, it's gangland. It's all about machismo and "irresponsibility" perceived or real. I don't know where he gets statistics on unspayed animals, but anecdotally if you go to the SPCA website or the pound, most of the dogs that end up there are pitbulls or pitbull mixes and other badass dogs favored in bad neighborhoods by darker skinned people. So maybe he is right. Yes, the dog runners don't want all those pitbulls getting euthanized. But on some deeper level, they are really angry about it, and they are angry, I can attest to that, because the dogs represent people who are breeding out of control and have already made us whities a minority in LA. The campaign to castrate dogs is in fact an sublimated campaign to castrate the black man, the latino, and the illegal immigrants. It's a way for upper class, educated whities who consider themselves liberal to express these frustrations without taking any social flack for it.
A stretch, but interesting I think. But this is what I think about whenever I accidentally happen upon a dog park and get scolded.
My dog is black by the way. So there. |
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| 1978 TV |
[Jan. 13th, 2008|09:56 am] |
I am now watching "The Dark Secret of Harvest Home." The miniseries starring Bette Davis, Rosanna Arquette and Tracy Gold. And that guy from Caddyshack. It's about some kind of sex and murder harvest cult in a quasi-amish like community in upstate New York. Very spicy. But also very slow and 70's. I remember loving this movie when I was a kid.
It's a gift from my friend Dante. He got it at a store out here that reputedly scours the earth for home made VCR copies of bad TV of the ages. They sell it all on DVD. They have everything, I'm told. |
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| Party Girls |
[Jan. 13th, 2008|08:38 am] |
Last night I went to my 7 year old niece's birthday party. It was like Village of the Damned, with a passel of beautiful little girls with long hair and princess dresses. Except the fat girl and the mousie girl in the genie costume.
Before too long my sister pointed out the genie. "we don't really like Genie," she said. She explained that she is on a cocktail of psych meds for depression and ADHD. Genie is a problem. Her parents are her "friends" but she disapproved of how they got their pediatrician to prescribe all these meds without any kind analysis of the kid, just on the parents' word that these were her problems and these are the drugs she needs.
A scary idea but probably true. Genie girl seemed all right to me. She gave me a big hug when I came in. She and my neice rushed me at the door. The other girls ignored me. This is a girl in need of affection.
Before too long, my niece started to display her dictator impulses. She made the girls line up because she wanted to teach them a dance move. She has taken dance lessons for a couple of years. The move was pretty complicated and the girls couldn't do it. She became very upset and increasing shrill and loud, "no like this, left right, cross, slide..." She was confusing her left and right as often as not and so were the girls. The girls were bored and frustrated, a morass of crashing princesses. Except for the fat girl who refused to dance and just wanted to sit by herself in the corner eating the leftover pizza. My niece, who was facing the girls and trying to make them learn mirror-image style, finally had a kiddie melt down because they weren't listening to her. My sister took her in the other room, came back, scolded the girls for not cooperating on Mya's birthday. "When it's your birthday we'll do what you want. It's not about bossing anybody around. It's about having fun." So Mya stopped crying, moved to an "easier" move that wasn't. The girls were no better at it, but they put on their serious faces and gave it a try, with my sister glaring over them, arms crossed. She had transformed a room of giggling princesses into a lineup of glum and clumsy automatons. She promised stickers if they did a good job. My niece made them line up, do the move one by one before getting the stickers. She wanted to dictate that some girls got more stickers than others. And again started to cry and stormed into the other room when my sister wanted to give 2 stickers to everyone.
My sister doled out the stickers very sweetly, soothingly to the chastened dancers. Then up comes Genie. Genie wanted more stickers. She couldn't choose. All the stickers were so appealing. She wanted this one and that one from that roll and these over here. My sister in a very nasty voice in which to be speaking to a 7 year old, snipped out two stickers from the end of the roll and thrust them at her, "They're just stickers. Get over it." Then wheeled around to serve the other girls.
Later they did a thing where the girls would dance and my neice would suddenly stop the music. Who didn't freeze was out. The first round she stopped the music, looked right at Genie, and said, "you're out!" Genie wasn't out. She froze I saw it. Genie said she wasn't out, she froze. My niece did the eye roll sigh thing you see on bitchy high school girls. Precocious. She started the music again, not taking her eyes off Genie. She stopped the music. "Genie you are out!" she yelled again. Genie didn't move a strand of hair, I swear. "I didn't move," she defended herself. "You're out. You can't dance anymore!" my niece insisted. The fat girl, still sitting on the sidelines munching M&M's, "Yeah Genie you're out." Genie gave up, "But I can still dance." My Niece, "you can dance but not here. you're not 'in'" The fat kid kept chortling and repeating, "You're out you're out." So Genie moved to the periphery and continued to dance by herself. Nobody else ever got out.
Then came the group picture, which my niece was taking with her new camera. The pretty girls lined up in a kick-line arms around each other. The fat girl stood behind, her forehead peaking over someone's shoulder. Genie was too central, and she was leaning. My niece became livid, "It's not all about you Genie." "I'm not doing anything," Genie said, and she was right. "Mom," my niece started to choke up again. "But I'm not doing anything!" Genie repeated. My sister scowled at Genie, "Stop complaining, you're always whining." I couldn't believe it. My niece took the picture with Genie in the middle and then she sat down and had another crocodile cry.
Later somebody hit Genie. It only got worse. My sister and niece continued to scold her for imaginary infractions.
I'm not one to interfere in anybody's child rearing practices. I will buy the bible stories for Christmas. The Barbie movies on DVD, even though these are things I wouldn't do if I had my own child. Fine. It's her kid. I took her aside and said, "you know, Mya's being really mean to Genie." She said, "yeah, she shouldn't have invited her. I don't know why she invited her." She had no trouble with the meanness, per se. Just the poor making of a guest list. I didn't know where to go from there.
My niece is a lot like my sister at that age. At any age. She is a mean person in a lot of ways, always clipping people down when they least expect it. I do think she's a good mother. Especially as a single mom. But I'm starting to fear that she's raising a person I might not particularly like one day. She's raising herself. I had some hope that all the religious zealotry would make my niece friendlier in some way. My sister never had any moral framework growing up, not secular or religious. Her father is a full-on sociopath, afterall. It's understandable that she's a little mean.
I don't mean to say that I don't like my sister. I love my sister. I like her most of the time. She's smart and funny and feisty. I don't like her some of the time. The meanness I could do without. I hate to see it passed on. |
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| neighbors |
[Dec. 24th, 2007|03:52 pm] |
I have long hated my upstairs neighbor. He had 3 dogs in a tiny apartment and I think he beat them. Always with the yelping. When he walked them he never scooped the poop. He flooded my apartment twice while overflowing the kitchen or bathtub while washing the dogs. He always plays his music at volume 11. And always at ungodly hours of the morning. Goes with all the coke he did. And he keeps his TV and stereo in his bedroom, right over my head. Not in the living room. I have gone up there a bunch of times and knocked on the door. He usually doesn't answer. When he does he snarls, dismisses me, denies the flooding (even though soaking wet), or turns down the music for 3 minutes then up again. He's a pretty scary looking rock hard gym bunny gay man who hates straight people. My subtenent heard him beating somebody up once. Person hit the floor and didn't stir for a while. I've heard lots of rough sex, but nothing that sounded criminal. Eventually I stopped going up and just suffered in silence.
Miraculously, a few months ago the music stopped. I have been blissfully sleeping through the night but always with an edge of dread that he will return.
I learned today that he died. AIDS. The person who told me this, the building manager, also has AIDS. Another tenant. Maybe they were friends. I tried to sound sympathetic. But I'm not so much.
The new tenant, according to the building manager, is the son of the founder of Starbucks. All I can think of is fuck, he will have a nice stereo. And he's young. So he'll have gold digging coke snorting bimbos up there all hours of the night. Why is daddy putting him up in my building, I wonder? Is he the blacksheep? A ne'er do well? It has to be punishment because this building is crap. The manager said the kid has no job but has $750,000 in his checking account so they gave him the lease.
I think he's going to be a pain in the ass, but the chances that he will be scary are slim. So an improvement. |
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| breasts |
[Dec. 19th, 2007|06:51 pm] |
Yesterday a patient came in with her husband and a mammogram showing a suspicious 9mm nodule on her breast. Only she was muslim, dressed in a full on burka. Her husband said that the doctor could not examine his wife. Couldn't look at her couldn't touch her. Because he's male.
We were at a loss. Why come to the surgeon if you're not going to let the surgeon touch or look at the area of interest? My boss said he couldn't take her as a patient (obviously) but he ordered the stereotactic biopsy. Problem is, all the radiologists he knows who perform the test are male. So the problem is going to recur. Even if he finds a female surgeon for her, and a female radiologist, it will still be impossible to find an all-female OR. There's an anesthesiologist, a nurse, a scrub tech, and all the other people that walk in and out of the OR during a case.
So he told the guy this was going to be an obstacle. He only spoke to the husband while the wife sat quietly while her fate was decided.
The guy wanted to know what are the chances if she doesn't even get the biopsy, if they take their chances with a suspicious lump to avoid a man having to see her body.
My boss became a little upset. He went on a rant about how he himself is Iranian and he knows how strict things can be but that the man is wrong, he is just not right about risking his wife's life to avoid another man seeing her breast.
Of course the man got upset and said that wasn't what the kind of advice he was consulting the surgeon for he just wants to know what are the odds she's going to die if they don't get the biopsy.
My boss said he couldn't even discuss that, ordered the biopsy and sent them away.
The lump if it is a cancer is small enough now that it will likely be completely cured with excision. If they sit on it it will kill her in time. If it is cancer.
We'll never know what happened, but I don't think it's up to her.
In other religious news, I assisted in a leg amputation on an anemic Jehovah's Witness the other day. Very spicey. But it went OK. |
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| hiatus |
[Dec. 11th, 2007|07:22 pm] |
I haven't been around much lately, either reading or writing. Just really busy lately and not doing anything terribly new or interesting. I have a new job assisting a vascular surgeon. Love the job, hate the commute to godforsaken orange county. Today I feel like I would have gotten to use the bone saw but a pesky intern got in my way. There will be another chance. Vascular surgeons do a lot of amputations. I'm planning on doing amputations in exchange for corn after the apocolypse. So I'm paying attention. It's monkey work. I think I could do it in a pinch. Just need a hacksaw and a stapler. And whiskey I guess.
Also dating a nice fellow. Can't complain.
Except all this contentment is making me fat. Contentment and all that crap everybody brings to work at Christmastime. |
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| my words |
[Aug. 11th, 2007|03:48 pm] |
I noticed a while ago that my blackberry has gotten really smart about what I want to type. It knows before I do. When I type "wa" it knows I don't mean "was" and goes straight for "Waco," which is the name of my running dog.
I went looking for it's brain and found the custom word list. Here are some of my custom words, all of which I have typed to somebody in an email or text message:
Augmentin, Deadwood, dermatology, Detox, Disneyland, Dostoyevsky, Dyslipidemia, Enocrinology, Espanol, freakshow, Flannery, Gatos, globetrotter, gynecology, habeas, JUDGMENTAL (it's all caps), Keanu, Koreatown, Manhattan, O'Nuts, Obstetrics, Oncology, Outfest, Orthopaedic, Senatorial, Taxonomies, Thimersol, Vascular, Woolf, assholia, deprecating, evil's, disengagement, disgruntlement, doomsday, embarrasing, flabbergasted, fuck, fucked, fucker, fuckign, fucking, gastroenterologist, geektastic, goddamn, hmmmmmmm, ideologues, immortalist, implode, implosion, jackhammers, judgmental, malingerers, margaritas, myocardial, nauseated, neurosurgery, nutso, obsessing, ordinating, ovaries, overprescribed, quotidian, quiescent, radiohead, rudderless, rx, shit, shitbomb, shitty, sucky, toxicities, treasonous, tupperware, whiny, winnowing, workaround, writerboy,
xoxo, xxxooo
yow
and finally, zombies.
I'm thinking of changing this to my Livejournal interest list. Most of these words ring bells that actually do represent me and my thoughts probably better than my interest list.
Blackberry should set up a dating feature based on word lost crossover. |
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| what to do with my life? |
[Aug. 1st, 2007|01:23 pm] |
Right now I am working 2 part time jobs, my old surgery job because they can't find a sucker to replace me, and my new urgent care job in Monterey Park. I'm having a tough time deciding what to do with my career.
The Monterey Park job is supposed to be urgent care, which I wanted because it's a road to ER, which I like but it's hard to find a job in as a beginner. Turns out they don't have urgent care patients but they save me all the gynecology patients because I'm a girl. What I like about this job: It's an "underserved" population in a bad neighborhood. This is what I went into medicine to do. It's interesting because cost figures into every decision. Whereas my surgical boss would give Augmentin (expensive and more effective) my family practice boss gives amoxicillin (cheap and usually effective). Every decision takes cost into account. I think it's good to learn this stuff. Sure you want to give the best care. But if you give a welfare mom Levaquin she's going to find out the price and not take it anyway. It's good to know the workarounds. And I feel good about learning low-rent medicine. Because this country's health care system is going down the drain fast and I want to know how to fix people with a little bit of duct tape and 1950's generic medicines if I need to.
On the other hand, I'll never make much money. And maybe I'm not very good at it. They put me in charge of pap smears. But 3 of them have come back with insufficient cells to make a diagnosis, meaning I have to repeat them. And last night I couldn't find a woman's cervix! How embarrassing. I could feel it with my finger. But I just couldn't get it into view with the speculum. I think it was the angle. It was pointing up instead of at me. I was hurting her. Finally she asked me to give up so the other PA could do it today. I felt bad. I couldn't sleep last night worrying about it. She was apologetic and all "thanks for trying" very gracious, which made me feel worse. She says the other PA never has a problem. Sigh.
Which brings me to what I like about surgery. The patient is asleep. You can fuck with their hole all day long and nobody's going to complain. You do it til you get it right. That was also what was nice about the burn unit. They were all so doped up you could saw off their limbs and they'd snore right through it. And we did.
And surgery pays the big bucks.
So there it is. I like working with patients. I like learning Spanish. I like doing something I feel is noble and necessary. I don't like to think of myself as greedy.
But I also like the environment of surgery. If I like the surgeon and the staff, I really enjoy working on an asleep patient. You just chat and listen to music. It's hanging out. It can be very pleasant. It's fun to invade the body and cut things and see what a person has going on inside. It's the ultimate objectification. The patient is so disembodied it's like working on a car engine or some other very complicated machine. And there's dance to it. The surgeon and I, we are 4 hands. We try to be one brain. There's an elegance to it that can be a real rush.
And it's where the big bucks are. The swagger. The comraderie of peers. We will disembowel you. Back the fuck off. It's like that.
So the Monterey Park job is making big plans to increase my hours to full time, send me to classes so I can learn colposcopy, cystoscopy, laser dermatology, stuff like that. Since I've made it known I like to get invasive. Even though i can't always find the cervix. They want to open new clinics in worse neighborhoods. They want to change the world and bring me along to move up the save the world ladder, eventually managing other PA's and other clinics. They have plans. Meanwhile, I am still guiltily applying to surgery jobs and cushy hospitals. Benefits, pensions, a staff to cover my ass. Getting some nibbles. Can't decide what I want. |
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| 406 more days. |
[Jul. 19th, 2007|08:57 pm] |
My nephew has been called back to Iraq. He has to report for duty again in a couple of weeks. It's so crazy I don't even know where to start with it.
He got hit by a car bomb about 2 years ago. Spent months in the hospital. Then they unceremoniously told him that his benefits had run out and he had to go home. They have a predetermined time limit for how much hospital time you get for being hit with a bomb. So they dropped him at the curb with his IV bag and wheelchair and he got on a commercial flight back to Missouri.
He was on official medical leave for a while, then he got moved to reserves.
He limps. His right arm doesn't work right. He's covered in teacup sized burn scars. And that's the least of it.
The PTSD, the nightmares, the violent fantasies. My mom says if a squirrel lands on the roof, he jumps out of his skin with fright. He is a basket case. He's not getting any care, psychiatric, physical therapy, or otherwise because he doesn't have health insurance. No, the government does not provide health insurance to injured veterans. You are on your own with that.
It's unthinkable that they are going to give him a machine gun and put him back on the streets in Iraq. I guess they're just looking for cannon fodder. |
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| king drew |
[Jun. 16th, 2007|08:31 am] |
I keep reading about this King Drew story. If you're not local King "Killer" Drew is a hospital in a bad neighborhood that opened after the Watts riots with a lot of "black power" fanfare to provide medical care to a neighborhood that didn't have any. Nowadays it's known mostly for murderous incompetence and entrenched beaurocrats who see their role as racial crusaders more than health care providers. For political reasons and because it's the only hospital for miles, the county has been unable to shut it down. Recently, a woman went there and squirmed around on the floor of the ER waiting room for several hours, vomiting blood, howling in pain, while the triage nurse repeatedly denied treatment because she was a frequent flier who had already been discharged. The media has made a real villain out of the nurse. And the janitor who mopped around her. A summary, http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-king16jun16,0,2317856.story?coll=la-home-center.
Granted, the nurse did a bad thing. So did the janitor. But why haven't we heard about the doctors who treated and discharged her? Those are the ones whose careers should be in jeopardy. I want to know what tests they ran, what were the results? I'd like to see their notes. Did they even do a physical exam?
Once a doctor discharges a patient and says she's OK to go home, there aren't many nurses in this world who will go over that doctor's head and say, "I think you should look again."
Especially with a frequent flier sitting in a room full of patients yet to be evaluated.
It's really hard to keep perspective in an ER environment. Everybody who works there wants to help. But lots of patients are irritating, whiny, malingerers stealing money and resources from people who do need help. Everybody has chest pain, especially homeless people when it rains or drops a few degrees. Junkies who want opiods have kidney stones, which present a lot like this dead patient - with excruciating pain and uncontrollable writhing. Where I did my ER rotation in Queens, it seemed like maybe 1 in 10 patients was a likely drug seeker, which manifests with hysterical pain most of the time. I know it's hard to imagine, but once your eyes adapt to this light, writhing on the floor howling hysterically is not necessarily an indication that she has a genuine medical complaint. Every once in a while it is, but after a doctor has already worked it up, the chances that the complaint is genuine decreases to negligible.
It's also kindof amazing how the more minor the complaint, the louder and more aggressive the patient. Probably because they've had to wait longer and by the time you see them they are good and mad. I've seen people go into hysterics for a minor boo boo or a transient tummy ache. The environment of an inner city ER is conducive to hysterics. If the nurse knew this patient and she had a history of baseless histrionics and the doctor on duty cleared her, it's not the nurse's fault that she died. If anything, it's the doctor's. Why haven't we heard about the doctor? Why haven't we heard about the lousy care she did recieve as well as the compassion she didn't receive? |
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| ex |
[Jun. 10th, 2007|10:30 pm] |
Been hanging out a lot with my ex boyfriend lately. Time will tell if that's a good idea. For now I'm suspending disbelief.
He sent me this JPEG. A Danish guy found it on his Flickr sight and asked if he could use it for a bookcover. It's a christian book about prayer in despair. He's despair guy. They offered to pay him, but hell, he's willing to be despair guy for free. He just wanted a copy of the book, which came in the mail this week.
Despair guy or no. I still think he's hot. I guess that's a good sign I shouldn't be hanging out with him. Or is it?
Rhetorical.
I'm going to do what I'm going to do. |
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| Fucking up |
[Jun. 3rd, 2007|11:05 pm] |
Today a friend told a story about his friend who married the girl everybody hated, the girl who wanted nothing to do with any of them. I was drinking and tired and in a maudlin mood and the story triggered a flood of defensiveness. I was once that girl.
My first serious boyfriend, the love of my life, Kirk, was a very popular guy. He was handsome and rich. His family owned an island, no joke. He was funny and kind. The moment I met him, I thought, “This is the guy I will marry. He is unlike anything I have ever known. The good man. Good. I will show all the co-dependent clingy asshole loving women in my family how it’s done. I will marry this man and be happy.” Really, these were the thoughts in my head within moments of meeting him. To me he exuded a white hot light of goodness, of safety and shelter of everything I had never known. I remember the moment we met. Introduced by a friend as he pulled out a ream of computer paper, old style with sprockets and showed me how he got a C on his final project which he worked on so hard what an idiot he was he would never be good at school. Self deprecating and hot, chain smoking. Some days he wore suits because he had a part time job on Wall Street. But they weren’t normal suits, they were very 80’s, shiny, vintage suits with skinny ties. Tall, blonde, blue. Nazi Ken doll. He didn’t do drugs, but he drank a lot. So I gave up all the drugs I was doing to spend more time on the campus binge drinking circuit to catch more time with Kirk.
We became fast friends. Very close friends. He turned out to be quite shy. Not comfortable at a party. He would seek me out. We would talk for hours, oblivious to everyone else there. Every once in a while a pretty girl would interrupt, throwing herself at him, a bird against glass. He never seemed to notice. Oblivious. He had no idea how hot he was. I had such a crush, but I considered him so romatically out my league that I never considered it a real option. We both dated other people.
He dated Jessica, the one of whom I was most jealous. I just googled her and discovered she is an authoress of such titles as "Smart Sex: Honest Expert Information To Answer All Your Questions." Figures. Her dad was the CFO or something of Beatrice. Remember Beatrice? They got broken up in the 80’s after a series of misguided ads in which they bragged about owning every common household brand you can think of. Beatrice is big brother. So Jessica was the Beatrice heiress, or so I’d heard. And she was smart and beautiful and funny and she stalked down Kirk like a bunny rabbit and became his girlfriend. That lasted a long time. I was a comforting shoulder to cry on when Jessica and he started to fall apart. He broke up with her eventually because she was too bossy.
Then there was Lauren Graham, that Gilmore Girl. She pretty much is that character. She’s quick, smart, funny. She pursued him relentlessly. I wasn’t comfortable around her, she would give me looks. Saw me as an interloper, which was more credit than I gave myself. The chemistry wasn’t right, they didn’t last long. Then there was probably the most beautiful girl at Columbia, Eve. But dumb as anything. His friends made fun of him for dating her. Fuck her sure, but date her, it was kind of embarrasing. I felt sorry for Eve. She never deigned to talk to me, except once she made some comment to another person about how girls play with their hair when they’re nervous and it just telegraphs to everybody else how green they are. She was referring to me, but talking to somebody else as if I wasn’t there. When he was dating Eve was when I finally really did give up any shred of fantasy that we would be together. If that’s what he wants, he will never want me. It seemed clear enough.
Meanwhile, I dated a deadhead who wasn’t very nice to me. Dated is a kind way of putting it.
Eventually Eve broke up with him. He told her he loved her. “Everybody says that but nobody really knows me,” she replied in her best little girl voice. He knew he had made a mistake. He gave me a call. Shortly thereafter we became a couple. Together for 8 years. We still speak regularly. We’ve grown apart. He’s married to another and we don’t want to be together, but when I talk to him it’s funny how our rapport picks up where we left off. We have our own language of in-jokes and half sentences. We laugh a lot. Nothing translates. You wouldn’t understand. Even now, we talk like 3 year old twins in our own world, with sounds and gestures and shared memories. I know not to call when his wife is around.
But what triggered this whole trip down memory lane was being the girlfriend everybody hated. Kirk was a BMOC. Old school. All my friends had crushes on him. In fact, I think there were girls who were nice to me solely to get access to Kirk. People who never knew him recognized him. Even years after we graduated strange girls would run up to us on the street. I lost a friend, a good friend, I think because I started dating Kirk, who she thought she had a shot with. She's now a big-time movie producer, who ironically is making D's next film. He hasn't filled her in on the connection yet. I'm not sure it would be a good idea. Last I met her, I got the distinct feeling she still held the grudge. Young girls take dibbs seriously.
So there was this party once in San Francisco, shortly after we graduated where one of his best friends from school came over to talk with us. Matt Gonzalez. He ran for Mayor of San Francisco last election. Got some national press. Ran on the “poor boy makes good” ticket. Which was total bullshit. He was always a smarmy rich kid. His dad was a tobacco executive. Anyway, Matt, who is hot, you can google him, was kind of a James Spader smarmy womanizer type. He was friends with the Kirk who dated the beautiful rich girls. He travelled in that rarified world. I don’t think he ever met the shy misfit I knew and loved. He drunkenly pulled Kirk aside and told him to shape the fuck up, what was he doing with his life dating a girl like me, he could do better without even trying.
Kirk was a sweetheart, with the poor sense to pass along this tidbit of information to me. His point was something like, “Matt has obviously never hung out with you because he would love you and I think you guys should get together, but what a funny misconception.” Isn’t it odd how clueless some people can be?
From thenceforth I hated Matt Gonzalez, and if I lived in San Francisco I would never vote for his liberal poor boy ass.
Kirk was the beginning of my self-esteem. I remember thinking, "Kirk loves me, I must be OK." I once shared this thought with Kirk, and he thought I was nuts. "I don't even know what you mean by that," he said, "I'm the one who's lucky."
Eventually Kirk and I broke up. All of our friends rushed to set him up with their sisters and friends. Still a catch. I was no longer invited to my "friends'" parties. Even my mom wanted me to fix him up with my sister.
I did in the end, turn out to be the bad guy. I cheated on him, I broke his heart.
Maybe Matt Gonzalez was right. But for all the wrong reasons. Jackass. |
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| gripe |
[May. 30th, 2007|01:46 pm] |
Saturday I have to go to my niece's ballet recital. She is 6. It costs $25. It is 4 hours long, in an amphetheater in the valley with professional lighting and sound. I would rather have root canal, but it is important to the 6 year old that I go. My mom is flying in for it.
I just went to her thousand dollar kiddie party recently, which I understand is considered cheap these days. It was in one of those store-front playspaces. It was tightly regimented with teenagers blowing whistles and shuttling the kids around from room to room in 15 minute blocks of fun or pizza or designated snack spots, with another horde of kids tight on their heels. Looking forward to her kindergarten graduation. They have formal graduations at which they expect gifts, parties, new outfits, every year or so.
This all seems crazy to me. I don't think it's good for kids to have all this money and attention for no good reason.
Also I started my new job. Nothing interesting yet. May be a bust. Did one pap smear and culture plus pregnancy test. The patient needed an ultrasound for pelvic pain but she refused because MediCal won't pay for it. Gave her antibiotics, sent her home. Oh - but I did it all in Spanish, which I guess was exciting in itself. Phrase of the day, "Voy a tocar la vagina ahorita." Gracias. |
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melt212's journal