push it for me! huh!

You got some back pain?
Hey man, this will relieve it
Two of those and two beers
You better believe it.
-Nice Train, The Donkeys

I'm on obstetrics now and doing 24 hours on, 24 hours off. This kind of messes with your circadian rhythm and I often wake up feeling really hot, or woozy or sick. In general, a "call hangover" is relatively common, regardless of what rotation you're on.

When I was still on Peds, I woke up with a bad headache after being on call and had to hurry into work. As I crashed around the kitchen making breakfast, I went and grabbed a few Tylenol from our medicine rubbermaid.

I found the medication to be quite effective but I was feeling woozy all morning. My preceptor was pimping me in the Neonatal ICU and I just couldn't work through the physiology we were discussing. The headache returned at lunch time and I took some more Tylenol. By the early afternoon I was feeling woozy again and actually quite unwell. I finished seeing my patients, did my dictations and then took off. It wasn't until Courtney came home and offered to get me more Tylenol, did we realize that I had been taking Tylenol #1's (with 8mg of codeine) all day. This revelation neatly explained the effectiveness of the medication and the subsequent brain fog.

It was pretty embarrassing. There is probably a lesson in there for me about how easy it is for patients to make medication errors.

Prince George is still good. Tory came to visit me last weekend which was lots of fun. A week from tomorrow we go to Christina Lake for a week.

pink pedal baptism

It was horrible... I started yelling at him,
'What are you doing?'
and I was in complete shock.
Like, something like that doesn't happen every day
-Excerpt from Globe and Mail article "B.C. man guilty of microwaving cat"

Often, nothing really happens, which is actually a nice thing I think. Sometimes, however, this worries me, I mean, think of how bored young people get nowadays when old people try and tell stories. And old people have had pretty eventful lives. Great Wars, Great Depressions, Great Immmigrations. These things make for Great Stories. What do we have to talk about? Real Estate Markets? Stephen Harper? Poor Grammar/Inappropriate Capitalization? I actually think I've written about this before, which just goes to show precisely how many interesting stories I have. I wonder what I will tell my grandkids. Nice stories about how everything went well generally don't make it into print. Although global warming is shaping up to be a real happening. Or peak oil. Alien invaders? Something.

This may sound like I'm wishing something horrible on myself or society in general, which of course I'm not and have easily prevented while knocking on my desk while typing this (does IKEA furniture count as wood?)

Anyhow, so here is what I do when I don't have any stories of my own.

Katelyn just got back from a 3 week trip to Cuba. It's part of a Queen's spring course- FINP 310 "Financial Discussions with Parents". Seriously, it is part of a real spring course, but I don't know the course code and the parental discussions are more of a spinoff from the course rather than the main objective.

Tory still lives in Edmonton as far as I can tell, although I'm fairly certain this applies only during the week. On the weekend she prefers to live in Toronto, Vancouver or New York.

My parent's dog Mackenzie has microcytic anemia and hypothyroidism. On the way home from the cabin we heard a news story on the CBC about a veterinary clinic in Seattle that is offering bone marrow transplants for dogs (for about $15 ooo-20 000 USD). In related news, 1/3 of the world's population lives on less than $1 a day.

My dear friends Aaron & Jieppe, their baby boy Peter and Nintendo Wii are moving to Louisville, Kentucky. Apparently normal people can buy a house there. Luckily their Honda Civic will not be joining them in the home of the Slugger, the first human hand transplant and "The most exciting two minutes in sports". It instead will be joining a fleet of similar mid-sized, late-model imported cars in level P3 of The Vine (temporarily, until they sell it).

Courtney is working night shifts at VGH ER these days, so we are back to the two ships routine, although not nearly as extreme as it was in the fall. I just heard her alarm clock go off which means it's time for me to go to bed.