Whew!

I had a pretty good day at work yesterday and I would like to write about a few things.

My IV skills are staying about the same. I have been having some bad luck in the last several weeks but yesterday I placed 4 out of 7 attempts successfully. Not bad and I only had to get help once! I still get a thrill on placing an IV successfully - I hope that feeling lasts. And, don't worry, those 7 attempts were on 3 different people and two of them needed 2 IVs. I didn't poke 1 person 7 times!!!

I got all my paperwork done at a reasonable pace. I wasn't pushed too much. My patients were generally pleasant people. It was sunny outside and I got my lunch break on time. I got a couple of breaks. I got to chit chat with some of my favorite colleagues on the job (even one of the doctors). I am a happy woman.

One of my patients was nearly my age - about 6 months older than me. His cardiac cath revealed that he has severe coronary artery disease and he will go for bypass surgery this week. It gives me pause when my contemporaries come in, and have bad disease. You hope they are all false alarms!! He should do very well with the surgery, however, I am not sure he understands how his life will change in the future. I don't know if anyone talks to him about his risks in the future, such as possible heart rhythm changes necessitating a pacemaker, possible restentosis of the bypass grafts requiring a second bypass. If the disease continues, he will be out of options - they can only do bypass twice.

Of course, technology may be very different in 20 years and there may be more options available then.

I don't know what the "right" answer is - in this person's case, without surgery it is very likely he will die young from a massive heart attack. The kind where the person just keels over one day and hopefully doesn't survive...because if he did survive he'd likely have a lousy life remaining. There may be no value in giving him all the information about what is to come after bypass - and it may even be a detriment because it could cause him to delay or cancel the surgery with dire results.

But I digress. I've digressed along these lines before; I think the decision process for surgery is fascinating and complicated.

My point in writing about this patient is that he had two 11 year old children - twin girls - that came to see him. I found those kids insufferable. Yakkity yakkity yak. No seriousness. You'd think they'd have some sense of the situation, that Daddy's in the hospital and he's going to have major surgery. He could die. He could even die before the surgery. Nope.

On the one hand they are ignorant and I suppose their parents did not impress upon them the seriousness of the situation.

On the other hand, they are 11 years old and should have some idea about what a hospital is and why people go there, and such. Maybe no one ever taught them about it.

Maybe Mom and Dad don't appreciate the situation, either.

Broken family. Naturally, Mom and Dad are divorced. Dad's "main family contact" is his ex-wife. I just don't get that. If you need to remove someone as intimate as a spouse from your life, why do you continue to hang around with them? When you have broken the family, why do you continue to act as a family when it's convenient?

My subject for this post refers to how relieved I was that I was turned off by the kids. Yes, I am not parent material after all, and despite my doubts, not being a parent is really the right thing.