In honor of Nurse's Week, I had Karen get me about ten pounds of peanut M and M's, which I partly distributed between the emergency department and the intensive care unit. I say partly, because I kept about five pounds for my own use.

Yesterday's entry made me start thinking about my high school days. So here's some more...

When I was in Junior High, I went to a pretty racially divided school. Essentially, there were three kinds of students there: Black, White and Upper-Class White. The Upper-class White people paid no attention to the other two groups, and they were pretty well ignored by the other two groups. I was in the other group, the "white trash" group. There was a lot of racial antipathy from both groups, and most of the fights that occured in that school were between black and white. There were a few white-white fights, but no black-black fights that I was aware of.

This pattern remained basically the same when I entered Topeka High school, but there were now also Latinos involved. By this time, though, maturity was beginning to set in, and the fights were less frequent, although they were bloodier. They were also usually scheduled to some degree... "So-and-so is going to fight whats-his-name on Tyler street after school!" Everyone knew when the good ones were going to happen. There were also occasional flareups, with no apparent cause, between people who were not already acknowledged enemies.

The first black-black fight that I saw was a scheduled event, in front of the school on 10th street. Bobby Lovely was one of the antagonists; Bobby was one of these super-strong muscle guys. I knew him pretty well, and he had always treated me OK. The other guy was Joe Maples, who had been one of my tormentors in Junior high, but I had not seen much of him for a couple of years. Joe was strong, wirey and very fast. I was a junior at the time when this happened, and so was Joe. Bobby was a senior, and had pretty much established himself as the baddest-ass in the school. This was occasionally contested by others, of course. Topeka High was a huge school, there were like 600 people in my graduating class... there was plenty of competition there.

Anyway, Bobby just kicked the shit out of Joe. I don't think that Joe even laid a hand on him. I should have been glad, given the history that Joe and I had, but I wasn't. I felt sorry for him. Later, Joe and I became pretty good friends. We would share liquor and cigarettes frequently at athletic events and things like that. Joe was the first black guy that I got to know, and I liked him a lot. He had gone from being a bully to being a pretty nice guy. I don't know if part of that was from the ass-kicking that Bobby gave him or not.

Anyway, I lost contact with him after high school, and I had heard that he died in Nam, but I've never had any confirmation of that. Bobby went on to school and was a back-up running back at KU for a season or two; he was in the news a few years ago for bashing some people with a baseball bat at a softball game, and I think that he got sent to jail forever for that on the three strikes and you're out thing that we have here in Kansas (and maybe everyplace else?)

There is no real moral to this story. I think that it was the start of me being a bleeding-heart liberal long before it was fashionable in Kansas. Come to think of it, it still isn't very fashionable in Kansas....

Home late... two techs called in today, including the one who was supposed to get there at 07:00. Which means that they have three techs to do the work of five... and it's gonna be a busy day. There will probably be a lot left when I get back there at 19:00 tonight, I bet.

Not a bad night at the hospital. Weird, everything happens at once, then nothing happens. Then you get relaxed and BLAM! everything happens at once again.

We had a patient flown in Sunday night who had been bitten by a rattlesnake. He was being treated with the antivenin and he was allergic to it. My question was, if he was allergic to the antivenin, shouldn't he not be allergic to the actual venom? I went through two or three nurses before I found one that knew: the venom is a neurologic agent, and the allergy is to some extraneous product in the antivenin. So I learned something today... and so did you.

I decided that I would bitch about stupid people instead of my own maladies... but right now I'm too tired and worn out from working so hard, and I can't think of anything to say.

Good Day!