I got up on time again after getting to bed at a reasonable hour last night. However, sometime during the night my nose plugged up and I had to take off the C-PAP, and I woke up with a super-dry mouth. I just hate it when that happens... I should get up and get a drink, but I never can get enough awake to do that until the alarm goes off... Interesting day... my role today was doing biopsies, something that I kinda like doing, just because they're interesting. I did two today, the first one went OK, but the second one was a marathon. The doc was trying to get tissue from a collapsed vertebral body, T-6 it was, and that's a helluva place to try to put a needle. But he got it, three hours later. The patient was a large lady who was paraplegic and she had a helluva time laying on her stomach, besides the fact that she was in constant pain before we even did anything to her. The tissue was needed to differentiate between a septic process (bad) and a metastatic process (worse). If it's a septic process, it can be fixed, although she probably will remain paraplegic. Hopefully the pain that she's in will go away. So I didn't get lunch, and I had to get a cheeseburger from the grill. With onions... love dem onions! And usually I do OK with onions, but the hospital onions have something anti-doug in them. That's why I keep Tums handy at work.... I talked to Lisa Dunbar's mother at work today, she and Lisa are applying for a small business loan to start a catering business... I wish them well, they are both hard workers, but it takes more than that to run a business, I hope that they have that too. Whatever it is... Obviously, I don't have it. I used to want it, but not any more. We had another rather weird case today... 19 YO kid with advanced Hodgkins. He waited to come in because he had no insurance... neither did his parents. He's still curable, of course, but the debt that he'll build up will certainly affect the rest of his life. Health care isn't cheap. Hopefully, some agency will step in. I've seen four obits in the last week of people that I went to high school with. Of course, they came pretty close to seeing mine 12 years ago... better me reading theirs than them reading mine. Yeah, that's a pretty egotistical viewpoint, but entirely accurate. Some day it'll all catch up with me, although I hope that's a long way off, I know enough to not get cocky about it. The number one thing that should kill me is lung cancer or another coronary, of course, but there are other diseases that I'm susceptible to... well, we all are, I guess. Most likely, whatever kills me will be a surprise... 'cause I like surprises! Well, really... dying of something common would be pretty boring. Cancer is boring *and* painful. I don't really like pain much either, although the medical world is getting better about giving terminal people drugs. Actually, if my only choices are living on pain drugs or dying, I'll take dying any day. Not that I'm against drugs, but it's kinda like, what's the point? You hafta take the drugs to bear the pain, and when you're lucid you're in so much pain that you want the drugs... no thanx. Just knock me in the head and throw me into the crematorium. Then scatter my ashes on a body of water somewhere... OK, I'm pretty depressed now, and you probably are too. So I'll go off to sleep and you can enjoy the rest of your evening.