I had to make a trip to the hospital every ninety minutes last night. The last one when I was actually on call was at 05:00, for an inpatient. Who needed labs done before I could do her exam. Said labs had been drawn, but when they were drawn, it wasn't a stat order, just routine, and they run the routine ones at 08:00.

So, they changed the order to stat, and ran down the lab tech that had the vials. However, by the time that happened, the guy that was on call this weekend, starting at 07:00 this morning, showed up. So I left, telling him to call me when the aspiration patient was ready to go, and I handed the reins over to him.

Went to bed. Couldn't sleep, knowing that a call was coming, so I just laid there.

Got the call about 09:00, the lab values were still bad. The word at that time was that we could do her about 15:00.

So I stayed up another hour, then went to bed, thinking that I could sleep a coupla hours then.

Wrong.

Layed there awake.

Got a call about 11:00 (about this time I really start losing track of time) saying that the patient was on the way down. Got dressed and went back in.

Well, it seems that the doc had called for the wrong patient, or told the nurse to call for the wrong patient, or something like that. At any rate, it was yet another false alarm. Back home, went to bed.

Karen gave me a nice back-rub, but that didn't do the trick this time. But I persevered, and I had slept for about a half-hour when the phone rang.

It was for real this time.

This was a pretty amazing theraputic procedure, we drained about a half-gallon of smelly pus from this patient's abdomen.

(A little pause here, this damned system crashed yet again, and I lost about half of this entry. A shortened version follows.)

Anyway, she feels much better now, she'll be in the hospital maybe a week or less, getting antibiotics specifically targeted to the organisms in the pus samples.

We got her upstairs about 17:30 or so, and I clocked out and came home. Well, I went by Walgreens and picked up my semi-monthly pill supply and a box of cigars. And a big hershey bar. Yeah, I know.

Speaking of cigars, I'm quitting when I come back from Texas. Uh, stop me if you've heard this before... O'wait, you can't stop me! Sorry 'bout that, heh.

I put out an emergency email for JD, since I think that I gave him the only bootable OS that I've ever been able to make, and I'm making no progress on Tyler's machine at all. If he can find it....

I'm saving this with every sentence, just to be safe.

So, next on my list is... sleeping at least twelve hours! Starting after I go down and play some music and get relaxed, this has been a somewhat stressful day, it has. Mostly because it's been two days not separated by a night. Well, there was a night, but not a sleeping night. Let's see, I usually start getting goofy at about 36 hours, and it's been... 37. Yep, that's about right.