Up 24 hours right now, and a hard day ahead.

If the tech that called in sick yesterday comes in today, he will have to make up for it, 'cause I'm gonna be heading home to bed, I am.

And if he doesn't?

That really will suck, truly, truly.

I had to go in about 22:00 last night to do an ICU patient, and that took about an hour. As I came in I noticed a note on the main scanner, saying that the part will be in at about 09:00 in the morning. And then about three hours to put it in.

Anyways, I did that patient and came home and cleverly shaved and showered. Wait, I meant that I was clever to do that, not that I *can't* cleverly do those things, as I can cleverly do most things that I do.

After that I went to bed.

Almost asleep.

01:09, the phone rings. I pick it up quickly so I won't awaken Karen.

Another patient, this time a relatively easy exam... if the patient had been cooperative. Well, the patient *was* cooperative, to the extent of their ability, I really don't want to sound unfair about this.

So, I got home at, O, 02:40 or so. Took off my clothes and went to bed.

Almost asleep.

03:09. Yep, exactly two hours later.

This time it was an easy one, and I clocked out about 03:45.

Prematurely, as it turned out.

I got on my jacket and went out through the ER, and the doc stopped me. He wanted to check the WBC on a five-year-old with RLQ pain. Thought that I might want to save myself an unnecessary trip.

Well, yeah, I did, so I sat and waited about three minutes. The paper came out of the printer, the WBC was kinda OK, but the decision was made to do an appendix study anyway, it might simply be an early acute problem.

05:00, out the door. And still home here at, uh, 05:48. No time to go to sleep, but time to go play on the keyboard some, heh? Or read the paper, if it's here.

11:24. About an hour ago I called my supervisor and asked him if he had anyone to help my co-workers yet. Well, no... so I told him that I was getting dangerous, which was the absolute truth. Y'know, usually I'm really a nice guy? Not after about 09:00 this morning. No more mister f*$&%#g nice guy, not here, not now.

And it's not just that I was afraid of screwing something up, no, not all. I came really close to blowing up at first one co-worker, then about twenty minutes later I wanted to wring the other one's neck.

It's like, folks, this is not ever going to be a regular day, it just isn't. So kwitcherbitchin' and go with the flow? But no, any change brought about panic. And there were lots of changes from a regular day, yes there were. But the only things that bothered me were, not necessarily in this order, my legs, the fact that I had to work with a slow, crummy machine, the fact that patients had to be cancelled, the fact that both of my co-workers deserved to die slow, lingering deaths. O'yeah, and my head aches, and I re-hit my damned right knee not once but twice on cabinets in the CT control room that shouldn't be.

So anyway, about 15 minutes later the supervisor comes up and dismisses me, he's going to take on, not my tasks, but those of a co-worker so that they can do my job-of-the-day.

Cool; I didn't give a shit how it worked, I was gone. And walking out to the truck I realized how thoroughly shaky I was, it was a bit of a problem. In the hospital, of course, there are walls and handrails everywhere, but none in the employee parking lot.

I made it, though, and I'm enjoying not thinking and writing, 'cause I know that when I'm done it's gonna be about five hours of sleep for me... I do want to be able to sleep tonight, after all!

19:41.

Finally awoke after about eight hours of nightmares, and one very nice interlude where Karen gave me a leg rub and a body rub.

The nightmares are of the type where giant things are rolling over me, only the things were associated with family history in some way, and I felt ashamed because I was so ignorant and I didn't know what the things meant.

And cold. Cold in my waterbed. O'wait, Warm, it was warm. No, cold. I wanted to get up and put on the hooded sweats that I had fifteen years ago, the nice warm ones that I haven't been able to find for, O, fifteen years.

I couldn't find the energy, and I knew that I was going to freeze to death if I got out of my waterbed, 'cause it was colder, so cold, outside of bed.

I finally got awake enough to actually get up and not have it be an intellectual exercise. Found some pants and a hooded sweatshirt. Then I decided to take my temperature: 102.1F. Heh, that pretty well explains it.

And now that I thought about it, I remembered feeling really hot Monday morning, so this has really been going on through all of that no-sleep and all that hard work and all of that running.

At any rate, I now feel justified for not being able to work for 48 hours straight. I have to admit, I was feeling guilty. Yeah, I know, stupid.

The thing is, when I was doing trauma x-rays, the way my sleep patterns were screwed up, 48 hours awake wasn't infrequent.

On the other hand, when you've been doing trauma for as long as I had, you only need half a brain. With the challenges that CT produces on a minute-to-minute basis, I need my whole mind all the time, anything else is scary.

And this morning I was scared.

And right now I'm just still dead tard. And still a little loopy, yes I am. And I will be going back to bed shortly. I do hope to go in to work tomorrow.