A Few Quotes of the Week

Here are some memorable quotes from the last week, at least the G-rated ones...



* Medic: "This patient has MAD tenderness in their left knee!" I really hope they didn't document "mad tenderness" in their note. I'm trying to come up with a collection of lines taken from patient notes written by medics during sick call and use them for a future post.



* "Are you nervous Ma'am? Why are do you look so nervous? You're trembling!" This was the soldier who had to supervise me as I gave a urine sample for a random drug test. It could be the fact that I was trying to hurry for the three patients I had waiting up for me in the clinic, the company commander had to stop by and talk to about a patient before I went to the clinic, the fact that I had nothing to eat in the last 5 hours, or the fact that I just don't like having people watch me pee! I have come to terms with supervised random drug screens, as this was my third, but this person was a little bit too much into my business. As one fellow soldier says, "We get paid to have someone watch us pee!" Living the dream....



* Ruck march team member #1: "Do you see the horse?" Team member #2 " Oh yeah, yeah, I see it...yeah right..." Apparently in the Organ Mountains near White Sands and Las Cruces, New Mexico (which do look pretty cool) one of the mountains supposedly looks like a horse. Someday when I see it, I'll get a picture of it and show you, but for now...

I'll Bring the Strobe Light

That was my remark following the suggestion that we should throw a "block party" or rave for the new offices that my brigade's PA's as well as myself moved to this week. The three other providers and I moved next door to the same building that houses the lab, behavioral health offices, dental clinic, and pharmacy, so we claim the little nook or hallway that makes up our four offices and the three medic screening rooms. So far, I've noticed a couple things that I have to get used to: 1. I'm feeling a little more claustrophobic and can't get my usual laps around the building as I talk with other providers. 2. Since the other PA's offices next door, our evening "documentation-music" can be heard very easily and might even clash. My singing might be heard as well, but it's okay. My neighbor and I sang along to the same song the other night. We'll have to do some karaoke for our "block party." On the plus side, I do FINALLY have a working telephone IN my office!! This makes life so much easier now. A couple weeks ago I finally got my printer again and will never have to hand-write a profile again, woohoo! Oh, and my Outlook email account got fixed, and I found out that I had over 300 messages.

I guess this was a highlight of the past few weeks. The first two weeks after the break were especially hard. They say that the day/week coming back from vacation is always hard, but these last two weeks were the type of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot weeks where I thought, "C'mon now, REALLY??" My first week back we were down two of our providers who were on leave, so that left me and another PA to handle sick call. Some of the patients had things that had been going since before or during the holidays and were just NOW getting it checked out, like guy with shoulder pain for three weeks (he actually fractured his humerus) and another guy who broke his hand over a week before. I got to know about the fracture clinic real well. And then there were the "incidental findings" of x-rays from lungs that didn't quite sound right. One had a hietal hernia (stomach pooches through diaphragm - which was actually great, because I had been working this guy up for chest pain), and the other was a young guy who had some weird calcifications and a 7mm nodule in his left lung. And then there was this awkward kid who I had seen for a couple of other things before who was complaining of headaches and turns out that on an MRI he has a brain mass. I referred him to neurosurgery, and the same day after his appointment he calls to complain that he knows more than the neurosurgeon handling his case. So what am I suppose to do?? Oh, and then there was the very brief phone conversation I had with a commander when I was trying to explain why I sent a suicidal patient (his soldier, who had 2 previous attempts before) to the ER and the only thing he asked me was, "Didn't you ?know he was being seen by behavioral health?" Uggg, that 's a whole other story, but if I had a little more rank I would really have told him what I wanted to say. These two weeks were finished off with me giving a lecture that I had spent hours on preparing and with little sleep, for which I only had 5 medics in attendance. Yeah. Thank goodness I had a four day weekend after that. It was much needed.
My fifteen mile ruck march for the Bataan raining was also very therapeutic, despite a couple of blisters. I am actually training heavy now (35 pound rucksack (backpack)) but unless I find another soldier to take my place, I may have to go back and support the light team. Our practice was cancelled this weekend due to predicted showers ("I'll bring a poncho!!" ) and I was a bit bummed because it turned out to be a very sunny, although cold and windy, day.

Still living the dream...