Hi, everyone, what's up?

This comment came in earlier:

Feb needs to get to blogging...November 2 was a long time ago. I thought there was some resolution to keep this thing more updated???

Hey, that was a 2009 resolution, as I remember. (Or maybe a 2008.) Anyway, I have a good excuse:


I need to come up with a good Web nickname for this little peanut. She arrived on Christmas Day. (Yes, it's true the blog was already getting moldy at that point, but give a sleep-deprived new dad a break, eh?)

Work continues to be a nice hike up the learning curve. All that stuff I thought to myself, whoa, that's complicated. I can memorize some bullet points, but I'm going to need to work with this concept a few times before it really makes sense to me... well, I'm working with it. And much of it is sinking in pretty well.

The one thing I can say for sure about hospital medicine: we treat sick people. Back in the ER, the big challenge is one of volume: you have all these folks in the waiting room, and you need to find and treat the sick ones, while being nice enough to the not-sick ones that things run smoothly. It's a challenge to send somebody home, not knowing for sure, really, that nothing too terribly bad is going to happen. And it's a different kind of challenge to see a parade of people who honestly are not in dire need of medical attention after all - partly because that experience can confuse the issue and get in the way of helping those who really are in dire need.

On the other hand, it's been very interesting for me, picking things up at the step AFTER I'd become sort of accustomed to handing off the patient. "Hey, this guy's actually sick. We should admit him." Okay, well, much as I realized after EMT training that "somebody should call 911" had become "holy crap, now I am 911, kind of," now I'm one of those people to whom the ED admits patients. And in fact that's the bulk of my job -- admitting new patients.

I can talk more about the nuts and bolts of that later, if people care to hear it. Meantime, I just wrapped up Uncharted 2 with the baby asleep in my arms for the last couple of hours of the game. She's fitting into the household well so far.