Hippocrates In San Diego

Happy New Year!

All the best to you in the coming year. Especially if you’re reading this — I’m not convinced there’s anyone out there to see it.

I refused someone shelter tonight

It’s been raining steadily for the last two days. Today has been especially wet, and (for San Diego) cold. It’s pretty typical to get a prolonged winter rain like this, but this year’s storm is especially rainy.

Yesterday, one of my patients, a homeless woman in the hospital only so she could be placed in a care facility, got tired of waiting and left “Against Medical Advice.”

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Snapshots

Canned disclaimer/opt-out instructions for Snapshots, after the jump.

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Pounding Headache

I worked an overnight shift on Wednesday night, 7 pm to 7 am, as part of a new responsibility for our group. We cover our smaller hospital with an attending in-house at night to supervise the residents, provide backup for when they’ve reached their limit of admissions, and to cover the Bone Marrow Transplant patients, which is run in the daytime by the Hematology group. It can be a busy 12 hours, but generally not overwhelmingly so. I often can get a few hours of frequently-interrupted sleep from about 1 to 4 am. Now that the daytime Internal Medicine teams are now staffed by 4 hospitalists instead of 2, the weeks I’ll spend on the daytime service there will be relatively light in comparison. So it’s a trade-off, but a good one, I think.

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Juris Impudence

I’m sitting in the “Jury Lounge” (I expected couches and smooth jazz) at the county courthouse, waiting to hear my name called to enter a jury pool. It’s been nearly three hours since I arrived; half a Diet Coke and 40 pages of “Young Stalin” down so far. Unfortunately I can’t watch my newly ripped copy of “No Direction Home: Bob Dylan” on my iPod since I need to hear when my name is called. Stalin it is, then.

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Pregnancy Update

Thirty-two weeks and 2 days today. Wow — in less than 2 months our little boy will be born. These 8 months have gone so quickly.

Gettin’ wonkish…

My friend David emailed me today, asking if I had any interest in working to arrange a local, small scale discussion group on healthcare reform, as part of a call from President-Elect Obama’s healthcare advisory team. I think the idea is to have grassroots groups discuss the local conditions, and to provide some sort of input so that a national discussion can be had. This is exactly the type of discussion that was missing the last time Democrats tried to bring healthcare reform to the national stage: the Clinton plan was ill-timed (in the midst of an economic boom, with sharply decreased numbers of uninsured due to low unemployment) and poorly executed, politically. It wasn’t in the national consciousness like it seems to be now.

Continue reading Gettin’ wonkish……

Train Jumpin’

I’ve been taking the train to and from work most days since we moved up to North County in May. It’s been a positive experience thus far; not only am I saving quite a bit of money and using far less gas (fillups only come once or twice a month now) but I’ve had more time to read in the last 6 months than I’ve had in the last 6 years. The relaxation time has been the best aspect, though. Despite living in Southern California, I haven’t really dealt with rush hour traffic since I started taking the train. Now, if only California and San Diego County would pay for a more broadly connected, highly integrated, and faster public transportation system, we might actually start to look like a large modern metropolitan area.

iPhone madness

So I’ve updated the Wordpress software that runs this blog, allowing me to use the iPhone Wordpress application to post remotely. It doesn’t work perfectly — I initially typed this post and discovered that there was no way to save it. It was only after I refreshed the list of my posts (so that the number of new posts is zero) that a save button appeared. Weird. Hopefully this will work well enough for me to keep the blog up to date.

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