Some pictures from last weekend

View from the 38th floor of East 42nd Street.

Sunflowers on the farm, Tarrytown, NY

Brooklyn Bridge, the waterfall, Manhattan Bridge

Lerner Hall, Columbia University

Sheep's Meadow, Central Park

Waiting for the train at Bleecker Street

Freakin' social conservatives

What is wrong with you people?? Sorry to have a random post about politics and bat-shit-insane Republicans, but I need to get this out of my system. How is it possible that gay couples, some of whom have been partners for 40 years, are ruining the "sanctity of marriage" by getting married, and yet when 17-year-olds get pregnant, the right moral thing to do is to get married? How are shotgun weddings preserving the institution of marriage, yet marriages of long-term couples eroding it?? Argh! Crazy Evangelicals and their moral high ground. Thanks for letting me vent, I feel a little better.
p.s. Dear Conservative America,
Please teach your children about birth control. When they decide abstinence-only isn't cool anymore, they will need it. Thank you.
Fondly,
Liz

Finally!

Third shift's a charm: I finally got up in the LifeFlight Helicopter today. There was a lot of waiting around for things to happen, but I had (had) to get up there before I graduated.

photo:umasslifeflight.com

You can't make this stuff up...

Patient (looking at me intently): You look like Amy.
Me: Who's Amy?
Patient: My cat.

A night out in Worcester

So as part of my Emergency Medicine rotation, I have to do two ride-alongs with Worcester EMS. I had kind of a crazy and interesting night, which I feel like sharing parts of semi-publicly. We had quite a few calls tonight, which usually came in right as we were nearing a coffee shop (did the dispatcher know what we were doing and where we were going? perhaps). There were a couple non-interesting calls, so I'll leave those out. But even amid the mundane, the two paramedics I was with were quite a duo. They were hilarious and inappropriate, and just as I was on the brink of rolling my eyes at their adolescent humor, they quickly and smoothly sedated and intubated an old woman in respiratory distress. I mean, I had barely opened the bag with the equipment and I looked up and the tube was in her mouth (paramedic: "When you look in and see their teeth come out, you know you're golden"). Preceding her florid respiratory failure, she had just been having some difficulty breathing. Her rapid decline (this was the most serious gasping for breath I have ever witnessed) while we were on our way to the hospital forced me to poke my head up toward the driver and ask, in a polite and high-pitched voice, "um, excuse me? could you please pull over?" and as soon as we stopped she was intubated and we were on our way again. And the medics were nothing but patient with me as I fumbled with IV tubing and squirted saline on them (and on me) (Medical Students: Always Cool Under Pressure). Actually the scene wasn't as frantic as I would have imagined an emergency intubation on the side of the road to be. (End result: we brought her to the hospital, and I have no idea what eventually happened to her.) (Unsatisfying, I know.) What's also interesting about this lady is that she kept saying over and over she didn't want a breathing tube (known in medicalspeak as being DNI: Do Not Intubate), but then when she actually started gasping for breath and frothing at the mouth, she said she wanted the tube. This is not the first time I have seen this happen, where people swear up and down they want no "heroic" measures, then when it comes down to it, they want everything. I guess your feelings are different when you're thinking about what may potentially happen in the future and experiencing what is actually happening. I can't imagine the terror of knowing you're about to die, even if you're very old and very sick and have thought about it a lot. But this is a discussion for a whole other post.
Anyways, we had this other call which was to a "man down" in downtown Worcester. He ended up being a drunk guy with new and old cuts, scrapes, and bruises all over him, and large switchblade hanging out of his back pocket (which, upon noticing it, the paramedic and police officer quickly took). At first I was thinking, this guy's totally drunk, he was stumbling around and fell and hit his head, he's refusing to go to the hospital, why are we here? Then I got more of an idea of what was going on, and it turned out he was well-known to all parties on the scene, he's a sometimes-resident of the PIP shelter, he's pretty skinny and pathetic and gets jumped all the time, and had been beaten up today because he had $20 that someone else wanted. He carries the blade for protection. The officer told him he understood it was for protection, because there were some dangerous characters out there (I'm cleaning up his language in paraphrasing here), and then told him, after seeing a bottle of gatorade in his bag, to "pound that shit." I was kind of surprised (and then felt guilty that I was surprised) at how patient and respectful and just plain nice everyone was being to him. The man eventually decided to come to the hospital, and as we were getting out, the medic reminded him to please be polite and treat people with respect, and that's how he would get treated by the doctors and nurses. I'd like to think that's true, but I'm not sure the bleeding drunks sleeping in hall stretchers get treated the same as other patients. I know if there were a choice of two patients to go see, I probably wouldn't choose the drunk man in the hall. (I wish that wasn't true and I didn't think like that, but I'm being totally honest). But it was nice to see this man from a different angle; fine, he's an alcoholic (who am I to judge), but he's also just trying to survive (and has probably had a pretty bad life so far), and ends up bleeding on the sidewalk every couple of weeks because Worcester's Finest want to mug him for his $3.50 bottle of vodka. Life's a bitch for some people...so who am I to judge them and not treat them with respect??
[Side note: talking about this man brought up one of UMass' family physicians who works at the PIP shelter, Worcester's only (I think) wet shelter, and an all-around rough place. We quickly concluded that this particular doctor is a bald, male version of Mother Theresa, in that he is compassionate and respectful and patiently treats everyone, even if they walk out the door and start shooting heroin into their eyeballs; then they come back the next day and he treats them again. We are certain that he has an express, speed-of-light ticket to heaven. He's the kind of doctor that before medical school we all wanted to be like, treating everyone, being kind, being non-judgmental. Now most of us are just in awe that someone like that exists, and we mull over his saintliness as we elbow each other out of the way for the few open derm slots.]
And just when I thought I'd seen enough for one night, we got a "FDGB" (fall down go boom) call. We walked into the house, and it was (I'm not making this up) a family of deaf people. Most people that know me know that I love sign language and that learning it has been a hobby since college. It's not really a handy life skill (even though ASL is the third most common language in the country, after English and Spanish), and I don't think I've ever been called upon to actually use it. Needless to say, the paramedics were kind of stunned that I could communicate with this family and figure out what happened, and then talk to the patient on the way to the hospital. I ended up waiting there until the interpreter got there, leaving my ambulance to go out and take more calls, cause I felt bad leaving this poor person in a cervical collar strapped to a backboard staring at the ceiling and unable to communicate with anyone. I'd imagine that would be a pretty scary situation for a deaf person, only able to look up, not really able to move at all. At the end of the night I was pretty pleased that I hadn't totally forgotten all my ASL, though certainly it could use some work.
I feel like I packed a bunch of crazy experiences into one short shift. Thanks for reading this very long post (if you even did...and didn't skip right to the last sentence...I have a short attention span too, I know how it works). I don't think my next ride-along will be quite as adventure-packed, but we'll see... :)

Pittsfield happenings

This is getting blogged about, per request...
There was one hell of a fire the other day at an apartment building across the street from the hospital. Of course being voyeuristic like we are we rushed out to watch (and take pictures). And mingle with Pittsfield's Finest. I'm not sure what time the fire actually got put out, but it was after 11pm (and it started around 8). From what I read in the newspaper, no one got hurt, and the fire started on someone's stove. It was pretty impressive. And HOT (I know, I know, you think that'd be obvious, but it still surprised me). Plus I was watching the firefighter on top of the giant ladder hanging over the burning building, thinking, we must be made of different stuff, or have different neural connections (see?? I'm tying this into my neuro exam tomorrow, so it's totally like I'm studying) than me, cause WHAT would possess someone to do something like that?? I mean, this was a giant ladder and a big fire (see above image). Now, alas, the building is very sad and burnt-out looking. But it's still there, and at least the fire didn't jump onto the house next door (it was close - you can kind of see the roof next to the bottom of the ladder in that pic).

New post - I am alive

Sorry for the month-long delay in blog-posting. Life got in the way. You know how it is. :)
So, I wanted to write about an awesome music festival I went to yesterday, on my last (oh, the horror!) weekend in the Berkshires. It's the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival, and it's a four-day festival held on a farm in Hillsdale, NY (just across the MA line near Great Barrington). And let's just say the crowd was, um, unique. We were actually keeping a tally of the number of men we saw wearing skirts (and I don't mean kilts). Bras appeared to be optional. There was a woman wearing a flowing skirt, bikini top, and butterfly wings (like from a halloween costume or something), playing with devil sticks all day. There were multiple canoodling same-sex couples (which shouldn't make me, a super-liberal from the most liberal state in the nation, even really notice, but somehow it still did). There was (when the sun when down) a giant peace sign made out of tiny lights hung way high up in a tree casting a nice glow over the audience. I mean, there were adults hula-hooping. Needless to say, it was some of the best people-watching I have ever had the privilege to enjoy. There was also (and this was the main, draw, really), some awesome music. We saw (in one day!): Dar Williams, John Gorka, The Nields, and many other singers who were also great, but who I've never heard of before and I'm now too lazy to look up their names. At one point, Dar Williams sang with John Gorka, and I thought I would die of happiness. (And it goes without saying that she's a pirate's favorite folk singer, right, Hoyt?) And the weather was beautiful, except for about 20 minutes of rain (but it was a serious rain). Normally my days are filled with old sick people and bad cafeteria food, but yesterday it was chock-full of acoustic guitars and peace signs and organic smoothies. I wish I could bottle up that feeling of zen-happiness and unleash just a little bit every day. :)