Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
weird day
one of those days where nothing is normal.
Got into the office and my medical assistant told me I was assisting my partner that morning, at the hospital. Ran over to the hospital. Changed into scrubs. No partner, nowhere, so I figured I’d been told the wrong thing and he was at the surgicenter, not the hospital.
Drove over to the surgicenter, and he was almost finished. My presence was a fail safe — if he hadn’t been able to do the case the easy way, he needed me there to help him with the hard way. The easy way worked.
So at this point it’s just past 8:45 and my first patient was coming in at 10:30. I called my assistant and asked her to see if she could get the urgent referrals to come in. When I got to the office, she told me no one could come in, so I took the opportunity to go back to the hospital to see a pending consult.
The pending consult was a patient I know, who has something bad, probably the last something bad he’ll ever have. The hospitalist asked me to scope his airway. There wasn’t a whole lot of reason to scope his airway but considering how we surgeons dump work on the hospitalists from time to time, it’s a small enough thing to see their patients when they ask. But this fellow wasn’t interested in me scoping his throat. He wanted to know what difference it would make, and I told him that if he had a bad airway, he might die sooner rather than later. He was unfazed and told me thanks but no thanks.
Back to the office. Saw my few patients, then had the afternoon off. Time enough to get lunch, work out, pick up my son from school, and then take him down to the nearby medical offices for his vaccines. Then we went to the local library which, miraculously, was open. And then we picked up dinner at Popeye’s.
I finished American Gods this evening. As I mentioned before, I enjoyed it far more this time than the first time. Everything about it seemed better. Is that odd, or what?
And it makes me sad, too, because I wish I were writing again. Not that I will ever write as well as Neil Gaiman, but if I’m not writing, then I’ll never write as well as Neil Gaiman. Writing something is sort of a prerequisite to writing well, after all.
D.
My husband and I have a theory that sometimes you just aren’t in the right frame of mind for certain pieces of art when you first encounter them. Maybe it’s a matter of maturity, but maybe it’s also a matter of mood, the things life is throwing at you during that period, or a whole host of other things. We can’t even count the number of times we’ve listened to some new music, seen a new movie, read a new book and thought, “Meh” – then rediscovered it later and promptly fell in love. As a consequence, we’ve taken to holding onto things we assume we’ll be in the right frame of mind for at a later date. Sometimes the second listen, look or read only confirms our first impression, but more often than not we come to think we must have been nuts that first time ’round. In some ways it makes me think I must be far moodier than I realize on a day-to-day basis, but then again, some days you don’t feel like laughing and some days that’s all you want to do, so I may as well just run with that reality when it comes to my entertainment.
Amen to that! I should probably go back and re-read DH Lawrence. AP English forced us to read Women in Love (I think Karen was in the same class. The teacher let each of us pick one book off a master list and that determined the reading list for the class. An interesting approach, but oy!). Not a book for a 15 year old to read. But Lawrence was my grandfather’s favorite author, so maybe I’d like him more now.
I’m thinking it might be time to read Moby Dick (embarassing gap, that). No Joyce though. Nope. Not interested.
I love Gaiman!
Thanks, fiveandfour. Certainly makes a lot of sense.
Kira, skip Moby Dick. Life is too short. Or rather, do what I did, and read it until you get to the homophobhilarious scene where Ishmael has to bunk in the same room with Queequeg. That was special, but since there weren’t any similarly uproarious scenes after that, I soon lost interest.