This was the only time when I can honestly say I did not want to hear that damn song. Why?
The guy I'm subletting from is letting me use his desk, bed, chair, and walk-in closet. The problem is that his bed is a hard mattress, not a spring mattress. By hard I don't mean firm; I mean it's literally hard wood boards with about half a centimeter of padding on top of it. It's no different than sleeping on a flat board while undergoing intense Shaolin kung fu training. Hell, I'd better be able to shoot balls of energy from my hands and leap across forests as if I were light as a feather by the end of this summer.
We spent the day at Brotman Medical Center in Culver City, three blocks from the Sony Pictures (formerly MGM) studio lot.
The first thing we did was go into Radiology and look at the films for all 18 of the patients that were being covered for today. It was a pretty cool experience looking at real films and handling them, which in my opinion is somewhat of a relic among modern medicine; most hospitals with any amount of extra money lying around spends that money buying new radiology equipment. In most modern hospitals, they don't even use film anymore; EVERYTHING is completely digital. The technician takes the x-rays and uploads them directly to the computer, at which point the radiologists, wherever they may be (yes, radiology readings are now being outsourced to countries like India and China too thanks to digital technology) and the results come back instantly. The advantages are obvious: it saves precious shelf space, it shaves off a little bit of time waiting for the films to develop, it allows zoom, frame capture functions, it allows instant transportation to anywhere in the world (again, allowing outsourcing of radiology readings)...basically anything cool that came along with the combination of digitization and the advent of t3h internets is applicable here. Brotman, being old-school and broke (Brotman filed for Ch. 11 bankrupty protection in 2007), still primarily uses film, but that's cool.
The gaps in my teeth make it tickle even more when I suck your cock. Pretty please with a Cleveland Steamer on top?
--We interrupt your regular programming to bring you this message--
10:01 PM: The police just fucking showed up at my door.
"Are you Alexander?"
"...No."
"Is there an Alexander who lives here?"
"I have no idea."
"...Do YOU live here?" His hand shifts to his belt. I can't tell if it's on his holster or his walkie.
"I'm subletting from the guy who used to live here. I just moved in yesterday, so I haven't met everybody yet."
"So you did NOT call the police?"
"No, I did not."
A skeptical look crosses his face. His hand shifts slightly across his belt towards his holster.
"Let me see some ID."
I showed him my driver's license and my sublet contract. Everything checks out. He leaves, no questions asked.
--We now return to your regularly scheduled programming--
Being trained in the gloriously overlooked subspecialty of Infectious Diseases, most of LMH's patients are some pretty old people with urinary tract infections (UTIs) or something similar. There was, however, one pretty incredible story that I'm glad I got to hear first-hand.
Mid-40s patient had a historectomy at some time in the mid-90s. It turns out that three sponges were left inside her by the surgical team and she suffered through constant pain for the next two years; the doctors ran every test on her except for x-rays because they were so high and mighty that they were convinced that surgical devices left inside the patient was an impossible cause. Anyways, as a result of the infections from the sponges, she lost her bladder. She then had a neobladder constructed out of her own small intestine; the neobladder doesn't have nerve function; it simply serves as a reservoir. The patient has to manually cath to relieve the bladder daily. The problem with doing this on a regular basis is that the patient bring in external bacteria because nothing is perfectly sterile. The patient was admitted into the hospital for infections introduced due to the cath process. The patient was very lively and did not seem bitter at all - hopefully she had sued that surgical team so hard that "MY ASSHOLE BELONGS TO [name redacted]" became permanently tattooed on their faces as a part of the settlement.
Unfortunately, many of LMH's patients are simply pretty hard-aged folks who get bounced back and forth between the hospital and the incredibly shitty nursing homes from whence they came. Many of these nursing homes are really crappy and don't care about their clients at all. These people don't have any family members to come visit them. The common argument is that their families probably don't even know that they're being bounced back and forth between the hospital and the home; my hunch is that the families know but don't care. These are the folks referred to as GOMERs (Get Out of My Emergency Room) - people who simply languish and, according to some cold-hearted doctors, "old people who unnecessarily use up our resources and our beds."
Dementia is another common dysfunction when it comes to these people (I'm not going to use the term "GOMER" because it's rude and disrespectful). However, that's where the humor comes in - demented individuals are usually A&O x1 or x0; they'll have no idea where they are, what year it is, and what they're even in the hospital for. One sweet old man had a broken hip and was on traction but didn't even know it when LMH questioned him about it. When LMH began questioning this patient, he seemed fine - he knew location and time of day, but not year or why he was in the hospital. The two of them were carrying on a pretty normal conversation, and all of a sudden the patient screams, "WHY ARE YOU IN MY ROOM?!? WHERE THE HELL AM I? STOP TOUCHING ME!"
Bob Calonico had many sons, and many sons had Bob Calonico...
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