Good God, has it been that long since I posted?

Sorry, you guys. It's been busy around here. (In the same way that the ocean is moist or the Pope occasionally attends religious services.)

Hey, kids! Drugs are bad! Because if you do drugs, you might find that your drugs have been cut with something that contains strychnine, and you'll find yourself rolling around on the floor with your heels touching your head. As if that didn't suck enough, you'll then find yourself intubated and sedated in a hospital somewhere so that you don't twitch and jerk yourself out of the bed. And you'll stay that way for three weeks and counting.

And, while we're at it, intravenous injections of hydrogen peroxide aren't great either! I don't care if the self-styled guru who does your colonics says they'll keep you young. They won't. All you'll get is some nasty shit cutting loose into your brain. Please, please do not ask me, as I'm discharging you, when it'll be safe for you to go back to doing whatever woo treatment brought you in here in the first place, because it'll be very hard for me not to get snarky right then and there.

Only about thirty percent of the people exposed to syphillis will, if untreated, go on to develop the tertiary stage of the disease. It's still a good idea to finish your treatments if you've been diagnosed with the pox, so as not to end up with neurosyphillis thirty years after the fact.

Also, weird demyelinating diseases: Please do try to avoid them, especially if you're offered one which we can't identify.

And don't get your aneurysm clipped by a general surgeon in Backobeyondville. Really.

These last two weeks have left me and everyone else at Sunnydale with our jaws hanging open and our eyes wide. Weird isn't weird where I work, but this much weird, and this severity of weird, is.

I was watching Notamus eat my guacamole last night

...before taking it away from him in a hurry, because aren't avocados really bad for cats? Johnny?

Then I looked over my shoulder to see Max carefully licking his right paw and washing behind his ear with it. He then did the same thing with his left paw.

Something is broken in the space-time continuum.

Yo! Smart people! You are not disabusing me of my stereotypes.

Got up yesterday morning, set the makeup gun to "Slut" and checked my email. (This is my usual routine for work, and no, I'm not trying to catch a doctor. If I don't layer on whore paint with a trowel, people ask me if I'm sick. This is Texas.)

In the email was a note from a Faithful Minion who told me that somebody had quoted something on HN out of context. When I followed the link, I found that not only had HN been quoted out of context, the person who'd quoted me had gotten the quote wrong, and drawn completely wrong conclusions about what they'd misquoted.

On a professional website. A, like, *big* professional website.

So I sent the person in question a very nice email, correcting and expanding.

Once I got to work, I was told by a patient's family member that that patient was "very important and, actually, famous." This did not stop me from looking blankly at the patient and saying, "So. They let you cross the street by yourself" after he'd asked me one of those questions that just defies belief. ("They're gonna put me under for this surgery, right?" "Oh, no, we think the suffering of surgical patients brightens up the joint. NEXT!" Even worse than that. Swearsies.)

Then, about lunchtime, I checked my email again. In it was a snotty note from the person I very nicely corrected and a confused note from a Minion who read something wrong.

Reading comprehension: The Lost Art Of The Covenant.

I've long believed--since before I ever met the first Nobel Laureate I ever met--that truly brilliant people ought to be given minders. There should be somebody following every Genius Grant recipient around, making sure they don't leave their car keys in the freezer or put their shoes on the wrong feet. If you've won a prize for anything intellectual, you would automatically be issued some nice, boring, sensible person who'd tell you not to wear those shoes with that pair of pants and who'd make sure you didn't leave your head in the taxi.

My Sainted Father is one of those folks who'd misplace limbs if they weren't glued on. My Beloved Mother has spent the last fifty years making sure he doesn't wander out under a bus or absentmindedly mail his own liver to Abyssinia. She deserves a medal.

I deserve, after limiting my snark to the words "You're welcome, Doofus" more than once, a drink.

Please, smart people. Get it together. Or at least present a semblance of togetherness when you're around me.

Had a bad day? Have a beluga whale and a mariachi band.

Nothin' like blood up to your elbows.

The neuro CCU didn't have any patients, so I took myself down to the surgical CCU to be a general dogsbody and bottle-washer. And got my ass run off for three days straight.

It wasn't so much the lack of staffing as it was the acuity of the patients. And it wasn't so much the acuity of the patients as it was the cluelessness of the residents. And it wasn't so much the cluelessness of the residents as it was that every single damn thing that could go wrong, *did*, usually all at the same time, which was of course right around lunch.

Elizabeth called me into one of her rooms to ask if the leaking from around a JP drain was normal. Yeah, sometimes it is. . .but that drain site was leaking a little more than I would strictly consider okay. So, as Deidre packed Surgi-Cel around the area, trying to stanch the worst of the leaking, and Elizabeth called the resident, I tried to figure out where the blood was coming from. No go. There were enough holes in the poor patient to make any of them a contender, and no obvious source of blood.

Which means that the blood was coming from *inside* the patient, not from the hole the drain came out of. This is always bad, because it means that you have to re-open the surgical site and see what the heck is going on.

In came the resident. He looked at the drain site and said, "Walp, looks like the bleeding's stopped for now." I looked at him from across the bed and said, "On the outside, maybe."

And just then the patient turned his head and coughed out a fountain of bright red arterial blood from his trache.

Which is how I got blood up to my elbows. The patient is fine, by the way: a quick re-exploration of the area showed a small artery hadn't been properly dealt with during the surgery and had reopened--nothing that a few stitches, or something, and about six units of blood couldn't fix. When I saw him the next day he was relatively pink-cheeked and cheery.

What I've not mentioned until now is that, as all of that was going on in the room (and you know how it is, with Get me a suture kit please and Can somebody please call the fellow and Hold this there and tape that here), there was a person just next door whose head suddenly blew up like a beach ball for no apparent reason, and a person down the hall whose MAP (mean arterial pressure, a measure of how well you're perfusing) dropped into the 20's (bad), and another person who leapt out of bed over the bedrails despite having a dense right hemiparesis, and the fire alarm went off.

Just then the helicopter crew showed up, bagging a person who'd fallen off of something tall and hit his head and been transferred to us.

Run that tape back and play it over and over for two more shifts. This is why I took a five-hour nap today and will order a pizza tonight.