Sunday, June 28, 2009

A Knob of Widgeons

The poor old guy had been using an empty plastic cleaner bottle, for dish detergent or something, as an impromptu urinal. He was weak, suffering from congestive heart failure and a cardiac arrhythmia.

Anyway, he "got it stuck." He had been home for days with his penis stuck in a plastic bottle before he decided it was time to get into the system so he could get things fixed up. Maybe the bottle just got full.

At first the ED team couldn't effectively remove the bottle; they tried cutting it but this just left ragged edges in the plastic which tore into his sensitive member. Finally a talented urologist was able to remove the object without causing harm to the poor old guy.

Then his real treatment began. A diltiazem drip for atrial fibrillation and aggressive diuresis for his heart failure. A few ultrasounds showed that his anatomy was intact.

He had a daughter who lived away in another city. When she called to find out what had happened to her dad (she had been told there was a foreign object involved,) they handed the phone to me. They always do. Fuckers.

Religions are so anthropocentric. Science and evolution are not.

I think that if you practice enough introspection you will eventually come to realize that not everybody is like you. The more you explore the singularity that is yourself, the more you will be open to the diversity of all humankind.

Before you get so sick that you have to go to the local emergency department, you first have to build a hospital and train and hire the staff.

Music as we know it to be is not capable of self-replicating independently. It's more akin to a virus, which must enter something, a cell, before it can reproduce.

It now appears that the disequilibrium of protons around deep-sea alkaline vents may be the kind of energy source that enabled the first living things to occur. Disequilibrium is essential to life. Well, that explains a lot in my life, anyways.

We gave them paint and what did they do with it? They painted targets on things; everything, in fact. So let us not give them bullets.

4 comments:

Risa Denenberg said...

I love this. Not sure I entirely follow it, but the image of the guy and the bottle is so like what I see in my world. Are you saying we each should have our own hospital, because the "standard" hospital doesn't match anyone's needs?

shrimplate said...

I think that a reader's interpretation of any given text can be as valid as whatever the writer may have intended; that is, if the writer intended anything at all.

wstachour said...

I love this one:

"I think that if you practice enough introspection you will eventually come to realize that not everybody is like you. The more you explore the singularity that is yourself, the more you will be open to the diversity of all humankind."

This seems like liberal education's mission in a nutshell.

The music bit too :-)

Risa Denenberg said...

This post is featured in this month's Palliative Care Grand Rounds!

http://risaden.blogspot.com/2009/08/palliative-care-grand-rounds-august.html