Children's stories.....

Prism heart behold
His granite fingers unfold;
Bakulev's tale told.

A challenge from Facebook.......

 prompt

My submissiom

procrastinating

You know that if I'm here blogging, I'm not doing my homework which was due yesterday.
Just sayin'!

wasted time??

I ran outta time.  Out of time to put up a post of any significance.  On the other hand, what makes me think that any post I write has any significance?  Okay OK, I'm wasting valuable time.

I used to have enough time but on the seventeenth of this month I started a course called American literature: 1865 to present. Last week we started reading the Mark Twain Novel, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  We will read it in it's entirety and critique it.  There in lies the rub.  I've read this story more than once and have enjoyed it every time, but I don't read it to analyse it, I read it for the enjoyment of the story.  Now it's work and as such takes time to understand the questions and even more time to find and structure my answers..... so that's where my time has....

Oops, gotta go 

Come again when I've got more time to sit and chat.... Ta ta.

dream stream....

Mag 102

Images in my dream
Boomerang until I scream.
Celestial star stream.

Are we smart enough...

to elect effective representatives, or politicians as they are more commonly known ?

A conversation I engaged in earlier this week set my mind wondering if, in fact, common everyday people have the mental where-with-all to evaluate and vote for people with altruistic motives who will actually endeavor to do the best thing for the country and it's populace.

Today I don't even want to talk about the lobbyists who purchase laws favorable to their clients.

No, I want to look at some personal choices ordinary people make in their lives and ponder whether they can be trusted to make better choices when electing Representatives to U.S. government offices.

The fact that smoking causes lung cancer became public in  the 1920's by scientists in Germany.  Here in the U.S.,  in 1964 (the year I started smoking cigarettes,) the Surgeon General declared a link between cancer and smoking. It took twenty years before an aggressive effort began to discourage smoking in this country and even longer in some European countries..  Yet today people of voting age continue to smoke and  I doubt if any of them can say they are not aware of the facts that smoking has a deleterious impact on the users health.  Why should I believe that the personal choice to ruin ones health for momentary satisfaction can give rise to good choices in picking politicians?

How about the choice to over-eat to the point of Morbid obesity, and it is a choice.  Of that I have no doubt.

Or the fellow, or gal for that matter, who chooses to spend the weekly rent money or family grocery money in the local tavern or opium den.  What do you think of their history of making good choices.

The driver who chooses to drive drunk,  the rapist, the pedophile, the robber, murderer etc. etc.

In the conversation I alluded to earlier, the person with whom I was engaged, adamantly, wanted to paint all law enforcement people with a wide brush of negativity because a relative of theirs had been treated in a way that they felt inappropriate.  This example of what I call haywire thinking gives me pause to agree with pogo: We have met the enemy and he is us.

CRNA week: Pauly said......

17 years ago, golly it seems like only yesterday, I took my youngest child, who was seventeen at the time, to work with me, in the operating room.  He had just recently graduated from high school and would be leaving in a few weeks to begin his college experience, and I wanted to give him a glimpse into the world of an anesthesia provider to add to his list of yet to be determined career choices.

At the end of the day, riding home with me, I asked him what he thought of anesthesia as a career choice.  His response after taking a few minutes to collect his thoughts: "No offense dad, but anesthesia is pretty boring.  I know, you have to know a lot to make sure it is boring but just the same....."

He was right on the money so-to-speak; one of the great satisfactions for an anesthesia provider is, in fact, to take a situation fraught with risk for catastrophe and make it safe and, yes, boring.

**********************

Yesterday, Paul and I split up the cases in the ortho room.  In the early afternoon while I was administering anesthesia to a patient undergoing an achilles tendon repair, Paul came in to get set up for his to follow case; an arthroscopic shoulder surgery in the sitting position.  The airway management of these types of cases can vary from institution to institution and even from provider to provider, but in our setting oral endotracheal intubation (OET) is the standard.

He comes to the head of the table wheeling the Storz video larygngoscope.  This is a device used to facilitate placing an OET in a patient with a known or even supposed difficult airway. A difficult airway being one that is hard to visualize using a regular laryngoscope.  Next he prepares an endotracheal tube by inserting a malleable Teflon coated stylet.  I say to him tongue -in-cheek; "wow, you're going all out today.  Do you anticipate some difficulty."

Paul says the patient has a pumpkin shaped head, short bull neck, and small oral opening showing a Mallempati III.  He then off handedlysays:

"It's OK to say that you'll deal with that bridge when you get to it; but make sure you've have the toll money in your pocket."

 MSMAID is the toll money

Which makes dealing with a difficult airway look boring. 

Boring is the result of proper and complete preparation.

Caveat: My son's career choice: CPA.