Yup, just as I suspected... they expected me to work a lot harder than I wanted to last night.

My feet were hurting after two hours, and my back after about four.

Then stuff settled down, but the damage was done.

And I'm pretty damned tired, too.

And... I forgot to call the cardiologist's office about getting the event recorder (Holter monitor) so I did that this morning... I'm also supposed to have the Cardiolite Treadmill test done next Tuesday AM... so the office nurse wanted to put off the treadmill and have me wear the monitor for two weeks, then have the treadmill done. This seems kinda backward to me, and the nurse got pretty snooty when I suggested that. But the event recorder isn't really a diagnostic tool per se, but the treadmill definitely is. And I would rather have a diagnosis about why I'm having spells of v-tach instead of just verifying them.

At least, I think that's how it works. I might be blowing smoke, though, and the doc'll surely tell me if I am.

Anyways, the nurse will talk to the doc and see what he thinks. They should call back today.

I did have a coupla dizzy spells (well, not really dizzy, just a transitory mental displacement... {I can BS with the best of them, sometimes...}) but when I checked my pulse, it seemed all right. This, of course, is what the event recorder would pick up.

Those things are pretty neat... they save, like, a minute or two of data, so that when you feel something and press the button, you not only record what's happening right now, but what has happened in the minute or two beforehand.

But I can't help thinking that, gee, that would be good data to have at the autopsy...

Speaking of stuff like that, dying of an arrhythmia would not be a bad way to go at all. No pain, you would just faint and die. Not that I'm ready to go (after all, I did scurry off to the hospital when I wanted to be close to a defibrillator...) but... there are a lot of painful ways to die. Having a coronary is pretty painful, I can verify that. I have no personal experience with other ways of dying... personal experience as a patient, the dieee, as it were. I've had a lot of personal experience watching other people die, though, and it's seldom painless.

Moving right along here... had a couple-three interesting patients last night. One lady got kicked by a horse, fractured her femur. Horsies are mean, I always knew that. Why people associate with them I'll never know. They're about as dangerous as motorcycles... don't get me started on that subject...

Older fella comes in, sheared his thumb mostly off with a saw. Lotsa blood.

21-year old girl comes in, MVA. Spine board, the works. Neck hurts, belly hurts. Unrestrained, maybe thrown from the vehicle. Only person aboard. Neck x-rays show maybe fx of C-7, something funny between C-1 and C-2, too. Someone asked her if she'd been drinking. Yup, a six-pack. This girl maybe weighed 96 pounds... I never did hear her BA though.

The point here is... everybody only has three beers. It's the standard answer, but nobody has told this girl that yet. The BA can be 400, and the patient will say, "But I only had three beers!"

Went off to CT... her C-spine was normal, with a few congenital anomalies. Fractured spleen, lots of belly blood. Off to surgery... doing well now. Lucky girl.

And I'm a lucky guy... I have a nice warm soft bed to crawl into, and I'm gonna do that now.