Orbital and facial fracture in addition to the obvious black eye. Who would have thought a water balloon could cause so much damage?

This week Kelly and I started taking the kids hiking. The plan is to hike three days a week and do something like climbing on the weekends. Sounds like a fun plan to me. Wednesday, by the time we finished I didn't have time to go home, take a shower, and eat lunch before time to leave for work. So we swung by Blimpie and Kelly dropped me off at the hospital because there is a shower in the locker room. I was in such a hurry I didn't realize that I didn't have any of the basics for taking a shower other than the water. I got a handful of liquid soap from the restroom to use as shampoo and body wash, then had to undress without spilling it or getting it all over the inside of my shirt. It wasn't until after my shower that I thought about how I would dry off. On the changing bench there was one of those 15" dia. toilet paper rolls, and because the restroom is in a different location than the shower I reasoned that the toilet paper roll had been brought there for a reason. Perhaps somebody else had found themselves in the same predicament? I gave it a try but, as you could probably guess, the t.p. fell apart and rolled up on my skin. All I could find to dry off with other than my dirty clothes were shoe covers. They weren't absorbant at all, but I was able to squeegee the water the off. Today we were late again so I had to take another shower at work. This time I called ahead and had a guy I work with bring me a towel from the O.R. The soap was still an issue however.

Working in an operating room for the last five years, I've seen some pretty disgusting things: a ten pound hairball removed from a woman's stomach, a 2-ft long worm from a man's thigh, a blown out penis. So I'm not exactly sure where today's events would fall on a top ten list but it would be up there. The patient was having liposuction and the nurse apparently hooked something up wrong. I don't think suction canisters have a self-destruct mode (it doesn't seem practical) but something caused this one to explode when it got full. If you've seen the video of a bunch of idiots stuffing a crapload of dynamite into a beached whale carcass, it was like that on a small scale. It took two hours to clean the room while the patient was still asleep on the table for the second part of her surgery. They had to bring in ladders to clean up the fat globules that were dripping off the ceiling. The floor was still slippery like it had a thin film of Crisco covering it. After a while it started to smell. It was awful.

Today I also found out blood letting is still practiced (sans leeches). This was localized blood letting via needle as treatment for priapism or persistent erection. Somebody remind me when I get old to take those Cialis warnings seriously. I also heard a report of somebody "literally sweating bullets" but I don't know if that's a medical problem or something different altogether.