True to my word, I was asleep within about ten minutes of uploading last night's entry. Furthermore, I slept all night, wakening only when the alarm went off. I hit the snooze bar a coupla times, just for the sake of tradition. Work wasn't too bad today, either. Some hassles, but not as many as is usual, and we even had a coupla really neat pathologies, one of which I'll save for another day... mostly 'cause I don't understand it, and I hate to talk about stuff that I don't understand, unless it's religion or politics. Anyways... we did a brain CT on this fellow, had a seizure, speaks no english. The translator said that the patient says that when he dies frogs come out. Well, OK, so the guy's a nut, right? Only he's got some very interesting spots in his brain. Cyst-like structures, with a spot of calcification in each one. Not metastatic disease, the lesions aren't masses, they aren't displacing anything. Trichinosis. Pork that isn't cooked very well. Wild game that isn't cooked very well. Larvae get into the intestine, they are hardy, love digestive juices... they are encapsulated in a hard structure that is eaten by stomach acids. Then they bore into the intestinal wall, get into the venous circulation, hit the heart and lungs, bore through the pulmonary arteries and into the pulmonary veins and start their wild ride to wherever the blood goes... some of them end up in the brain, where they eat and eat and eat until they die, then they're encapsulated and the worm actually calcifies. Most of them end up in muscle tissue, where they eat all The ones in the brain cause no pain, of course, since the brain has no way of feeling pain. Something like that, anyway. So what the guy was probably saying was that when he dies, the worms will crawl out of him. I need to know if the word for worm and frog are close in Spanish, I'll bet that they are. Ever wonder where they came up with that idea for the movie Aliens? You got it. Creepy. Creepy-crawly, and absolutely true. I saw the pictures. Anyhoo. I got my flu shot today, I happened to walk by the place where they were giving them and I did the paperwork and got shot and gone in about two minutes. Sore arm, though. I was supposed to be on call last night, but the guy that I took call for last week said that he'd take it, so I let him. Well, he'd forgotten, but then he remembered after they called him... at 22:30. He was there until 01:30. Sometimes I gets lucky. Doesn't happen often enough so's I can count on it, though. Tonight is going to be an early night again... I do feel better'n last night, but still pretty draggy.
they want (very painfully) and then encapsulate, to start the process all over again.