Category: Allegory, parable, rhetoric

Critters

Sometimes I feel so close and personal with my patients. I mean, they bring their little critters in to share.  Bedbugs.

It’s really a pain. Once we identify that the patient has critters, we have to close the room and call Environmental Services to spray the room (meaning that Environmental Services department has to be staffed 24/7). Afterward, humans cannot go in the room for 2 hours (meaning I have one less room to use for 1/6th of my shift).

Well, the patient that left critters behind tonight, came back while the first room was closed. We had to put him in another room.

I just don’t understand. We spray the room to kill the bed bugs, he has bed bugs, so put him in the room that’s been sprayed instead of closing down another of my rooms for 2 hours!

Grumpy Uncle/Brother Dave.

Weary

Cutting to the Quick

5/10/14

In some African cultures, scarification is a means of beautifying the body, kind of like tattoos.  There are other theories about the reasons it is done.  As a tribal custom, a young individual of either sex cuts themselves or someone cuts them to cause a scar after healing.  The cuts are small in length, but are deep enough to cause a scar.  To the layman, that means that they are deep enough to be felt as a stab wound.  They are laid in a pattern that may be simple or elaborate.  Tonight’s patient had about 500 scars over the face to resemble a classical drama/comedy mask, if it were solid.

In the American culture, cutting oneself might get you 96 hours on a lock down psychiatric ward.

More urgent news from your grumpy Uncle/Brother Dave.

Weary

Hacking Social Media

November, 2016

I was at a high falutin meeting a few weeks ago. The speaker was trying to sell the Cardiology department a “cloud based” addition to the electronic medical record that would help in one of their protocols. The patient data would be kept on an Amazon server.

Being the little shit that I am, I asked, “Is that the same server that shut down last week because of a DDoS ?” A DDoS is a hacker tool causing a denial of service by flooding the server with requests.

There was a pregnant pause and the speaker said, “No, these are special servers and they have never been hacked.”

I let my shitty mood ride that one and got to thinking, never? So I googled hacks of Amazon and yes Amazon has been hacked. I remembered seeing a Fox News article on the recent hack that I’d mentioned in the meeting and tried to find it. Wow, it was buried. It is still out there but not so easy to find.

Then I figured, Amazon is this huge enterprise balancing on one thing. Security of it’s internet services. Should that come into question their existence would be in dire straights.

Then I started looking at other hack stats.

Yahoo lost personal data on 500 million users, Linkedin lost 167 million passwords to hackers, Heartland lost 130 million credit and debit card numbers, and Dropbox lost 68 million user names and passwords. That’s not all, and just this year. Well in 2012 and 2014.

Then I got to thinking, why did it take 2-4 years to find these humongous hacks? Did the hackers sit on their pot of gold under the rainbow for all that time? Unlikely. Most likely, the enterprises that were hacked sat on the knowledge until they absolutely had to publicly announce their misfortune. Well, their customer’s misfortune. They didn’t want the knowledge to get out to potential customers. Oh, and it’s not just the customer’s data that is lost in these hacks. If the customer has information about, say a family member or friend, that data is lost too.

There ought to be truth in social media laws.

I hope they don’t hack YouTube, I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t watch YouTube.

Your old grumpy Uncle/Brother Dave.

Weary

The Cost of Doing Business

January, 2015

I was very lucky when I started medical school. At that time, Baylor offered it’s Texas-resident medical students the same tuition as the Texas state schools. Baylor was a private Medical school and charged much more for out of state and much, much more for out of country tuition (I think I remember it was $10,000 per semester for foreign students). I paid $500 per semester for the first 2 years. Then the state legislature upped the ante to $2000 per semester. A 4 fold increase hit hard but was nothing compared to today’s rates.

But tuition doesn’t pay the bills. There are billions of dollars from private and government sources that make up the difference in what it costs to put a student through 4 years of medical school. The figures below reflect the dollars at that time.

1979-1983 Medical School $3 million
1983-1987 Residency $6 million
2015 Diagnosing an aphous ulcer (fever blister) in the ED at     12:15 am,  Priceless!

 

Musings from your Grumpy Uncle/Brother Dave.

Weary

Evidence of Mortality

April, 2015

I stopped at Casey’s for my usual road sustinence. They have, on the counter, a calendar with cute little comics or jokes and such. Today’s was…

An old man was taking a walk. He saw a little girl playing in the mud, making mud pies. He said, “Your pretty dirty.” She replied, “I’m even prettier when I’m clean.”

I recognized that immediately. I asked the clerk if she knew who May West was? Of course she didn’t. If you don’t know, May West (1893-1980) was a vaudeville actress, singer, screenwriter, playwright, heart throb and sex symbol for many, many years. It was Mae West that said…

“When I’m good, I’m very, very good, but when I’m bad, I’m even better.”

Just goes to show you that nobody is immortal or is remembered forever. Only 35 years and we’ve begun to forget her.

Your grumpy Uncle/Brother Dave.

Weary