Dr. B's MindBlog

My wife is out of town for the weekend.  It’s funny; for a guy who stayed unmarried until his 40s you’d think that it would be second nature to happily bop around the house alone when the wife is away.  You know, walk around butt naked, farting, ass scratching, singing horribly off key at the top of my lungs (although that’s not really any different from when she’s here).  But there’s definitely something missing.  Besides her buzzing in my ear about dishes in the sink or the sprinkler is not working AGAIN.  There’s something familiar, security blanket like, about having a woman you genuinely love sharing your living space and when she’s gone, even for a short time, you really start to understand that phrase, your better half.  I find myself thinking a bizarre thought that will eventually lead to an even more bizarre tweet. My instinct is to say it out loud to her to watch her wrinkle up her nose in that “oh my God, I’ve married an idiot” look to let me know that this tweet will at least make a few internet nerds chuckle. But she’s not here. Thousands of miles away. But it makes me feel all warm and mushy inside to know that I miss her; it’s easy to take her for granted when she’s within range.  But when she’s gone, and I’m rattling around our empty house like a lost marble, I’m longing for her, but I’m also feeling great knowing that I love someone that much.

My neighbor is so old I can’t tell if she’s really there or just haunting the place.

I quit my crappy county job a couple of weeks ago.  When I was in med school, I had these grand ideas that I would be like the TV doctors on St. Elsewhere, you know, be really snotty to people and be really rich.  I ended up working for a government institution so I only really perfected the snotty part.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not whining, it was a good living. Ok, I’ll be really honest, the money I made at my crappy county job is a lot more than most people make at their crappy jobs.  Crappiness is relative.  I figured, hey, since I spent 4 years in college, 4 years in med school and a large amount of money to become a doctor and then spent 7 years being a resident— a thankless 100 hour a week job—I kind of deserve to at least make a little more money than the guy who only finished community college and manages Best Buy, right? The County doesn’t care.  Physicians are highly trained warm bodies to them.  No rhyme or reason about how to  best use our skills.

So it took me 10 years, but I finally realized I was institutionalized like old Brooks in The Shawshank Redemption.  I looked at my bank account, felt to make sure my balls were still there, looked at my bank account again, and I just quit.  Some famous person said (I don’t know who, you have wikipedia, go look it up) “Everyone should quit at least one job in their lifetime”.  I guess this was as good a time as any. So here I am, highly trained surgeon, sitting in the house most of the day, watching Maury and yelling as loud as the ghetto folks on the screen when the results come back.  This is interspersed with a few days on trauma call and ER call a month (I was bored with my job, not with making money, I’m not completely stupid).  I’ll have to say it’s liberating for the moment, but I can see tweeting and blogging and watching sleazy daytime TV is going to get old quickly.

I was definitely born to cut people open so I’m working on becoming a busy general surgeon.  Just hoping Obamacare or Romneycare (they’re pretty much the same, huh) doesn’t derail me in the next few years.

Cheers, drinking another well deserved glass of scotch for all of you.

Anyone else think that the republicans seem like they’re preparing for a small town city council race rather than the presidential election?

“Elect me, Mitt Romney, and I’ll stop the hookers from giving handjobs behind the high school”.

So Soylent Green was people. Wow. I’m hungry now.

(Sorry If I ruined the movie for you if you had it on your Netflix cue. If you never heard of it, don’t sweat it. Charlton Heston is dead anyway.)

My hospital is in the middle of downtown L.A., not far from the famous Skid Row.  Naturally, as a trauma surgeon, I get a lot of homeless patients that don’t seem to realize that moving cars can have a very negative health impact.  Invariably, the ones that don’t get killed or turned into Downtown Vegetable Surprise, end up staying in the hospital for weeks, getting free food, sponge baths from pretty little Filipino nurses and of course, all the free Spanish language television that they can watch.  It never fails that most of these guys become very attached to the hospital and it becomes for them their own version of The Hotel California.  They demand double portions of food from the cafeteria, these the same guys that a couple of weeks before, double portions meant diving into the dumpster for a second time and coming up with another slice of discarded pizza.  They bitch and moan about the nurses not coming immediately when they press the call button.  They refuse to get out of bed and work with physical therapy unless they get several milligrams of dilaudid or some other powerful heroin like drug.  And unlike a hotel, where a bill is generated and on checkout day they settle up their bill with a credit card, these guys go back out on the street, leaving the bill for you and me to pay, sometimes a bill that is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.  

The brilliantly retarded city attorney helped pass a law saying that no homeless person can be discharged to a shelter, even if they are medically stable, or else the hospital faces criminal charges and huge fines.  So in short, the hospital becomes a boarding place for the city’s forgotten homeless who played chicken one time too many with a car, a fist, a bullet or a knife.  And we health care professionals get to be their concierges, their butlers, their exercise coordinators and their activity planners.

Something is definitely wrong with the way society treats it’s “discards” and certainly here in Los Angeles, the sleazy local politicians have found one perfect way to absolve themselves of any responsibility for these folks.  I’ll bet if I hang out on skid row one night I’ll see Mayor Villaraigosa gunning his Cutlass Supreme playing Hobo Frogger, laughing his mayoral ass off.