"Just don't get one so long that when you hang it around your neck, it whacks you in the nuts!"

I had to get a Hepatitis B booster shot today because my previous immunity wore off. I am told that losing Hep B immunity several years after vaccination is totally normal. My bet is that someone, somewhere is making serious bank off selling those Hep B vaccines. In fact, complete vaccination takes three injections. You think that's an accident?

A young good-looking nurse gave me the actual inoculation. I was sitting on the wax paper-lined vinyl bed when she came in. I was wearing these old ratty Birkenstock sandals (hey, when in Rome, do as the Romans do, and when in N. California, eat granola and stink of patchouli) that have adopted the contour of my feet so much so, that they form a seal as I apply downward pressure when I walk. This pressure, once great enough, causes any trapped air between foot and sandal to be forcibly expelled. The resulting noise of said expulsion very much resembles another bodily function. So she had me stand up off the bed to get the shot, and as my feet hit the floor, the little sound of air being pushed out of the foot-sandal interface resulted. At this point I realized that when I slid off the exam bed, the nurse had her back to me. I think you see where this is going... She kind of startled a little, turned around and looked downward, kind of at my crotch, and then caught herself and looked back up at me with a wry little smile. So then I'm thinking to myself, does she think I just dropped ass? Cuz I sooo di-int! Man, I wanted to shout "Sweatheart, I did not just fart!! Really!! That was my shoe!!" But instead I uncomfortably cleared my throat and avoided her gaze. After the shot, she wrote in my file for a really long time and then silently left.

Next, the doc had to come in with an explain of last week's test results. Apparently I am as fit as an Armani tuxedo. We chit-chatted about medical school a little bit and he asked if I had any questions. For med school, I have to purchase a stethoscope when classes start, so I asked him what kind he prefers. He went on a little about the different kinds available and what you really need as a student. Then he blurted out, "Just don't get one so long that when you hang it around your neck, it whacks you in the nuts!" and busted out laughing. This is the same man that, one short week ago, had his begloved hand cranked so far up into my nutsack that he didn't have to request a cough, a cough involuntarily erupted from me and my invaded loins. Yeah, sure doc, now you're concerned about my scrotal well-being. Last week I'm a speed-bag, now you're the Albert Schweitzer of gonad-land.

"Hey, he looks just like that Scorpions' album cover!"

I volunteer on Thursday nights at a little Emergency Room in my neighborhood. I started doing it just to get some clinical experience for my med school application, but I enjoy it so much that I am going to keep working there right up until I leave for NY. It's a small ER so we don't get major trauma like car accidents or gun shot wounds. Mostly we deal with sick babies, sprains and bone breaks, lacerations, that sort of stuff. We also have the usual drug seekers, hypochondriacs (called frequent flyers), and people who show up for things that don't really warrant a trip to the ER.

Carl is the triage nurse I work with most of the time. He's a young guy and is pretty cool. He's also a really good nurse, he got the "Nurse of the Year" award at the hospital where we work. Tonight we had this 4 year-old come in with a laceration on his forehead. The kid definitely needed stitches. The cut was about 1" long and so wide that you could actually see his little tyke skull. We get the kid into the triage area and get all his vitals taken and Carl looks at the cut and confirms that he needs stitches. He then begins to bandage the kid up with gauze and this non-sticky tape that holds it on. Imagine a disposable ACE bandage and you get an idea of what this tape looks like. As he's wrapping the kids head, another nurse comes over to talk to Carl about something and Carl kind of stops paying attention to his wrapping, but continues putting the tape on the kids head. About a minute later Carl looks down at the kid and bursts out laughing. He had wrapped the kids head from the top of his forehead all the way over his eyes. The poor little kid couldn't see and was groping around with his mouth open trying to find his mother. Carl looks over at me and says "Hey, he looks just like that Scorpions' album cover!" All I could do was shake my head and wonder aloud "How did you ever get to be our Nurse of the Year?"

Carl truly deserves his NOTY moniker:













I've only worked at the ER since February, but it's really shown me both the best and worst of human behavior. I've found that people who come to the ER can be split into 2 groups. Group A are the people who don't need to be at the ER, but are also the most demanding pains in the ass imaginable. Tonight a lady came in and filled out the little registration form and under Health Complaint wrote Need pregnancy test. You can buy a pregnancy test at any drug store for $3.99 and it takes you about 3 minutes to administer it yourself (maybe longer if you have to muster up some urine). So this lady trades that 3 min time investment for a 4 hour trip to the ER so she can find out if she's preggers or not. And right on cue, about 2 hours into her stay she starts complaining about how long it's taking for her to get an answer.

There are also the people who come in with the flu. I am talking about grown men and women who show up to the ER, write flu on their form, have temperatures less than 101, and no other complaint. We had a flu person in tonight who watched a man come into the ER via ambulance, being defibrillated (you know: CLEAR!!! shock charging...CLEAR!!!). The flu sufferer calls me to the little triage window and, I cannot fucking believe this, starts complaining that other patients who arrived at the ER after her were being seen before her.

"Are you talking about that guy just now?"
"Yeah, I was here waaaaayyy before him"
"The guy from the ambulance."
"Yeah the guy in the ambulance, maybe I should call an ambulance next time!"
"Let me ask you a question, are you breathing and is your heart beating?"
"What?"
"IS YOUR HEART BEATING?"
"Of course it is"
"Then you are in much better shape than the guy who just came in. So please go sit your no doctor-needin' welfare-receivin' no-compassion-feelin' ass down and we will get you in as soon as we can"

Yeah, I didn't actually say that last part out loud.

Now as much of a pain in the ass Group A is, Group B is much more frustrating. Group B people are truly ill. These are people with myocardial infarctions (aka heart attacks), out of control diabetes, people in kidney and liver failure. People in group B have severe lacerations or extremity injuries. These are people who need immediate and urgent care. It never fails that these are the same people who are quiet, never complain about waiting, understate their problem and are almost apologetic for being such an imposition on the ER Staff. Last week a lady came in and wrote Wheezing on her registration form. I asked her if she was having trouble breathing or feeling any tightness in her chest. "Oh no honey, just a little wheezing, nothing too bad." Carl was much more astute than I was and brought her back immediately. Her blood pressure was the highest I'd ever seen in the ER, her pulse was almost 200 beats per minute and her blood oxygen saturation was dangerously low. Carl goes "That woman would have waited forever and, without so much as a peep, died right in the waiting room."

There is alao a subset of Group B. I call them Group B juveniles. These are kids who come in and are calm, polite and don't cry. Tonight we had three. I told you about the Scorpion child already. He was covered in blood and clearly in pain, but never once cried or whined. We also had a 10 year-old who got his right middle finger caught in an automatic door at his father's work. He nearly severed his finger. As we took off the bandage his dad put on, it stuck to the wound and we had to kind of pick and pry to get it off. He gave a little "ah, ah" sound, but never more than that. Finally, a 3 year-old came in with a broken forearm. His little arm was clearly bent and deformed where the bone was broken. Not a wince, not a cry, not a complaint. He just sat there and let Carl get his vitals taken and then happily sauntered into the cast room.

Here are my rules for you to follow in a trip to the ER
1. Expect to be there at least 4 hours. Just accept it. If you see a lot of people arriving by ambulance on gurneys, get comfy.
2. Never, ever ever ever never ever ask the triage nurse "How much longer?" Ever. Just don't. First of all, the nurse doesn't know. Second of all, your chart will somehow get "accidently" misplaced for an hour and then, once found, will get put on the bottom of that huge stack of charts of patients waiting to be seen.
3. Be as specific as you can on the form. If you're having chest pains, write it down. If you are allergic to penicillin write it down. If you think that any medical condition you have could even remotely matter during your visit to the ER, WRITE IT DOWN!
4. Be as polite as possible to everyone you encounter in the ER. Pleasant patients get triaged, into a room, seen by a doc, treated and discharged so much faster than the rude ones.

Towards the end of the night it got a little slow and out of the blue, Carl looks at me and says "You know what dude? Beverages & More is my favorite store."

Amen brother.

"Is this the Burger King?"

I quit my job today. Well, technically speaking I gave notice today that I was quitting my job. It's not like I told my boss she could go suck it, nothing that dramatic. I work (worked?, well work for the next three weeks anyway) at this super high-tech company in Silicon Valley. We do knowledge representation in the life science field. In a nutshell, we take genomic literature and freely-available digital genomic information and, applying a controlled vocabulary, code it into a inferable relational database...this could be the single most boring sentence I've ever written and I believe I'll abort it now. Now take that sentence and imagine working at it for 5 years. Although, the 45 minute argument about whether the term "erection" represents an object or a process was fun. Nevertheless, I quit today.

So why does a 36-year-old PhD-holding well-paid scientist up and quit? Why, to go to medical school, of course. Yup, that's right. At 36, with 10 years of post-secondary education under my belt and 5 years of experience in biotech, I needed a change and decided that med school was the right prescription for me. I guess most guys would probably just buy a Porsche and bag a trophy wife to quell their misgivings about past decisions. Some might even move to Montana and while away their days eating in fine restaurants, hiking in the wilderness and communing with birds of prey. I call those guys pussies.

This whole idea started about a year-and-a-half ago in a conversation with my buddy PopD. PopD and I worked together until he tragically lost his position in what was termed a "reduction in force". PopD claims the only force reduced in that action was his ability to afford his pay-per-view porn habit. Over the next several months, PopD made mooching food and garage space from me into an art form. During his "man of leisure" phase, we talked a lot about our mutual disdain for the company that I currently and he formerly worked for. He said he was glad to have gotten the boot because it essentially forced him to finally pursue the thing that he has wanted to do his whole life. It was something to do with animals and frankly I forget what exactly and since it's not about me it is therefore not very important. He mentioned a motivational speaker he saw whose whole philosophy was that the only thing that you will be happy doing in life is the one thing you always said you wanted to be when you grew up. So if you were the kid who wanted to be a fireman, you should become one. If you wanted to be head photographer for Hustler, you should pursue that calling and avoid anything that distracts you from that goal. PopD asked me what it was that the child in me wanted to do when I grew up, I told him I wanted to be a physician. You know, with the beneift of hindsight being 20/20, that was a mightly big decision I made there. PopD better know what he's talking about. Come to think of it, good ol' Poppy smokes copious amounts of ganja. Oh well, what's done is done.

So I applied to med school this year and, despite an undergraduate performance that consisted mainly of drinking beer and ditching class and chasing trim, I managed to gain admittance to a medical school in New York City. Classes start August 15th, so between now and then I have to sell my house, sell my car, secure housing in the Big Apple, get my ass to the Big Apple from here, get all the health crap squared away for school, obtain sufficient funding to pay for said school, and a plethora of things I'm sure I haven't even thought of yet. Like cold weather clothing. I just thought of that! I live in goddamned San Fran California. I don't own any cold weather clothing. I do have a silver lame thong that I won at last year's gay pride parade. That metallic cloth will probably keep the sack nice and toasty.

I actually got all my health stuff done already. Except one thing. Apparently I misplaced my immunity to Hepatitis B. When I was working at UC Berkeley, I had to get immunized against Hep B. I went through the whole course of immunization, getting three different inoculations over 3 months and did all the lab tests to ensure that the vaccines took. Everything was fine, I was immune. Now, 7 years later, I have the same labs run and oops, no longer immune. Now I have to do the entire vaccination course over again. How exactly does immunity expire? I thought that was the genius of our immune system. If you've seen it once, you are set for life. I guess not.

But back to the job quitting. I dropped the bomb today and to my surprise, all the upper management jerkoffs were very supportive and happy for me. This will simply not do. It is going to be very difficult to bad mouth these people behind their backs if they insist on being so fucking magnanimous. Seriously, both my boss and the CEO were extremely kind to me and both offered to help any way they could. I asked each of them for 200 large, but I guess that offer of help was mostly symbolic.

So that's about it. Now I have to finish up work and get everything squared away for the big trek to the land where the ocean is on the wrong side. The next 4 years should be a wild ride.

Oh Yeah, about the entry title. My friend Joe has a blog where he titles all of his entries with song lyrics. I am playing off his theme (read: blatantly ripping him off) and am going to title my entries with a quote I heard during my day. Today's was a wrong number I got at my house. I answered the phone and the woman on the other end, in a thick Indian accent, asked me "ees dees da Bear-gor Keen?"
"Why yes," I said, "I am the Burger King."
She hung up. Perhaps she was angry that I, as the Burger King, insist on using cow in my sandwiches.