My life is going to get a lot rougher starting this Friday. I'm on call this weekend, as I might have mentioned. Well, Monday the tech who usually takes Friday night call announced that Friday was her last day working for our noble institution. I will miss her a lot, both as a friend and as a co-worker. I have been, for the last three years, actively supporting her escape.... She is an excellent tech, intelligent and hardworking, and she always has felt that she didn't measure up, or something. She was not very happy. I helped her to attempt to establish her worthiness at another institution, one where her peerless qualities would maybe be appreciated. Additionally... I wanted to have somebody to visit in Florida... but that's entirely secondary. So. Today was a pretty slack day. We lost a tech in the afternoon to a new procedure that we're doing, thermal ablation of tumors. Pretty neat concept... the tumor is approached via CT imaging with a 15 gauge needle containing eight probes which unfold umbrella-like in the tumor. Electricity is applied to the probes (and the other end of the circuit is conductive pads on the thighs) and the tumor is subjected to high heat. And, according to the literature, it actually works... PET scans in two months usually show complete termination of the tumor. And, if it doesn't, they go back in and do "touch-up" ablation. Pretty cool shit, heh? Anyways, I got off an hour early, thinking that I would get some stuff done, but instead I pretty much collapsed. Last night was bad, I had to take off the CPAP to breathe, and Karen said that I snored all night. I don't know if this is my first cold of the winter or the last one of the summer, whatever, it's still pretty miserable. Sneezing most of the day, dammit. I'm sure that some of the symptoms can be attributed to the cigars. No, that doesn't make it any better, that bitter knowledge. Smoking sucks, and I'm going to stop doing that after this weekend. Ah, this weekend. The afore-mentioned tech will be on until 23:00 Friday night, and after that I'm on my own until Sunday at 17:00, when another kind soul will relieve me. So that's not really as bad as it could be... but I'll probably be up at least 36 hours doing exams. Not something that I'm looking forward to, but better'n the three straight days over Memorial Day weekend. And I did say that I was going to bed early last night, but I didn't... re-reading Paine's The Age of Reason for about the tenth time. And similar stuff... and, of course, I couldn't sleep when I got to bed, so whatever, so shit, it's gonna be early tonight, though. I was gonna not eat tonight (I'm down to 215 now, whoo-hoo!) but Karen was cooking some corn for her salsa that I'm taking to work tomorrow, and I decided that yeah, I wanted some corn. And some left-over steak from last Friday.... The way to hell is paved with good intentions, as my Mom usta say. She probably still does, in fact....