Zombie Squad

A patient coughed up a giant gob of mucusspitlunggoop while I was drawing his blood. Most of it wound up on my isolation gown and gloves, but some got on my face. I immediately threw up into my mask, for obvious reasons. There is no moral to this story. It's just disgusting. one more reason to be g...

A patient coughed up a giant gob of mucusspitlunggoop while I was drawing his blood. Most of it wound up on my isolation gown and gloves, but some got on my face.

I immediately threw up into my mask, for obvious reasons.



There is no moral to this story. It's just disgusting.

Patient: Get the fuck away from me! Nurse, help, Hitler is here!

So maybe I should stop goose-stepping into rooms and shouting at patients in German.


The patient thinks her nurse is Al Capone, though, so at least I have interesting company.

5 am Walking down the hall to a room, two different nurses let me know the patient is nonverbal but needs his labs drawn. I walk into the room, notice the terrifying level of crazyeye he's rocking, and begin to be concerned that I'm going to get (silently) punched. "Hi, sir, my name's shrapnel, I'm ...

Zucchini spinach lasagna, for when you don't care to use noodles and are willing to waste time faffing around with zucchini. Adapted from here. 3 or 4 Medium to large zucchinis, sliced thinly (1/8" thick is good, but I had a lot of variation and it was fine) 1.5 c part skim ricotta cheese 1/4 c parm...

I've been cooking a lot recently, so I'll try and add some more recipes to here. Tuna burgers, a recipe of approximations because I don't know the exact measurements of anything. Feeds probably 8? 12 cans of tuna or skipjack or something fishy, drained 3 eggs, beaten A few cloves of diced garlic, or...

Seriously, everyone knock it off. Quit with the semi-veiled religious/political stuff, and also stop arguing about it. Go to PM if you must.

Another night, another dead baby. Poor little thing.

Vicious cycle in a two person room: Bitchy lucid patient falls asleep and snores incredibly loudly. Sweet demented patient hears the snoring and starts narrating the snoring and asking her invisible husband if it's James over there snoring like a dog in the next apartment, and why won't Husband go a...

http://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2 ... ve-updates

Please avoid politics and so on.

Ahem. Back on topic, please.

Wait the mother's milk is... Poisoning? them? How does that work?

Caution, sadness ahead. Today's room that wasn't marked but should have been* contained a woman and a tiny baby. A very tiny baby. Why was the baby not in the NICU? Why wasn't the baby under a warming lamp, on account of it being so tiny? Why was the mother holding this little baby who surely was to...

Here's one. My favorite coworker, let's call her Jen, went into a woman's room to draw blood. This lady is about a million years old and can't weigh more than 80 lbs. Jen started the draw, and the woman was getting more agitated but Jen was almost done and, you know, a tiny old lady isn't gonna do m...

Awkward: Trying to draw blood on a formerly super sweet, grandfatherly guy who had a Medical Event while already in the hospital a few days ago, and discovering that he was newly willing to grab my boobs and crotch. Apparently he is not doing so well. Extra awkward: he was calling me his wife's nam...

Awkward: Trying to draw blood on a formerly super sweet, grandfatherly guy who had a Medical Event while already in the hospital a few days ago, and discovering that he was newly willing to grab my boobs and crotch. Apparently he is not doing so well. Extra awkward: he was calling me his wife's name...

This is relevant to my interests. I've got a ganglion cyst in my right wrist that isn't going anywhere, and shooting pistols righthanded hurts it. I'm going to try learning to shoot lefty, although I'm pretty strongly righthanded so o don't know how well that'll go...

Oh, you're right, herpes viruses apparently keep their DNA in a little exrtrachromosomal plasmid thing in an infected cell, mostly. Some get into our genomes sometimes but not as a standard thing. Carry on!

http://jvi.asm.org/content/84/23/12100.full

I don't know about its potency but I was vaccinated against smallpox. The benefits of being older. I had chicken pox as a child so I'm safe as well. Although I'll need the shingles vaccination when I am older. I wasn't aware chickenpox conferred any immunity except to shingles, as shingles is the a...

The follow up to Stabby is that he was on our list again the next morning. While we were warned about him at morning huddle, this wasn't super effective because huddle is at 0615 and we start rounds at 0200 or 0300. So another phlebotomist wandered into his room and got yelled at, but she somehow co...

It's mostly a moot point, really. The only rooms I know the keypads to are the tube drop stations and I'm not hiding in one of those. They're the size of a closet and only have one entrance. Like hell I'm getting cornered in there.

---------snip-----strongly consider trying to bash the shooter to death with a fire extinguisher or IV pole or whatever when s/he enters your hiding place trying to kill you (don't bash a cop or first responder, though). If I'm someplace that isn't work, the same basic plan applies, just there won'...

Our active shooter protocol (I just did the training) at the hospital I work at boils down to: abandon patients and get the fuck out; if you can't get out, hide (spread out and not clustered together for obvious reasons), preferably in a room with a keypad entry on the door, but not in a room that c...

It would be really awesome if we could avoid having a pro/anti police discussion. Nobody is in trouble, just, you know, saying.