I Can See! I had my 2 month follow up eye exam today. It has actually been about 2 ½ months since my Lasik surgery. The appointment only took about 20 minutes. First they did a regular eye exam where they had me read different lines of letters. Then I went to another room where the doc took a close look at each of my eyes looking for scar tissue or other problems with the flaps. The Final Results? The flaps are fine and my uncorrected vision is 20/15! Isn’t that cool!!!

Another Long Night I went in to work at 3:00 yesterday for a 16-hour shift. The usual routine is that I take over any case still going on until it is finished and then spend the night on call ready to take care of anything that comes in. We are not a trauma center so once the cases are done you can often have a quiet night. If you get a case it is most likely going to be to put in an epidural for a woman in labor. Unfortunately my luck on call lately has been all bad. When I got in to work I took over the case of a women getting a facelift. They were mostly done already and I woke the lady up and took her to the recovery room at about 4:30. By five I was up in the call room watching the news on TV and fixing my dinner. A couple of IV starts that evening were my only jobs and I lay down to try and get some sleep. Sure enough at midnight my beeper went off. They had a lady in labor who needed an epidural. It can easily take an hour to place an epidural by the time you go down stairs, preop the patient, place the epidural and do all the paperwork (the worst part). This patient had a little problem with her blood pressure so I hung around and monitored her for a while before getting back to the call room at about 2 am. I slept for about 2-3 hours and went down to check on her. She was comfortably sleeping (when the woman can sleep through her contractions you know it’s a good epidural). I lay down at 5 am. At 06:30 the beeper went off again. There was a second woman in labor wanting an epidural. I put in her epidural and checked on my first patient. Another nurse anesthetist relieved me at 8 in the morning. Unfortunately neither of my patients had delivered yet so I didn’t get to see the babies (one of my favorite parts). I got just enough sleep that I will probably just stay up and be zombie boy for the day. If we go anywhere today Thumper will have to drive. It’s a shame there isn’t a way to make all the babies come from nine to five!!

All’s Well That Ends Well One of the things that happens when you do anesthesia long enough is that you get a patient who you know personally. I have done anesthetics on a number of people that I have known over the years. It happened again this week. One of my neighbors was going in for surgery and she asked me about 2 weeks ago if I would do her anesthetic. I agreed and we had several discussions over the next two weeks about anesthesia and what she could expect. Those of us who do anesthesia sometimes talk about how it always seems that when your patient is some one you know or hospital personnel is when you will have problems. I am happy to report that my neighbor’s case went off without any problems and that she was able to go home the next day. In fact she was sitting outside earlier today and seems to be doing fine.

I hate the dentist!!! Several months ago I had my required annual dental appointment. Everything was going fine. There were no cavities and all I had left was the cleaning of my teeth and then I would be done. Then the tech asked the dentist to look at one of my upper molars. It seems that the tooth had a crack running down the side and even though it has never caused me any problems yet they recommended I be seen by one of their specialists. To make a long story short they ended up recommending that I get a crown on the tooth. Now if you haven’t figured it out yet I hate going to the dentist. It’s not pain that bothers me as they usually get me plenty numb. No the thing that I hate is the sound of the drill. To me the sound of a dental drill is worse than fingernails on a chalkboard. They can be working on someone else and the sound of that stupid drill still bothers me. It took almost 2½ hours for them to drill my tooth down and prepare it for the crown. I had my MP3 player with headphones on and had the music turned up pretty loud which helped some. I still white knuckled my way for most of the appointment. I now have a temporary crown on and will have to go get the permanent one in about a month. Oh Joy!!

Here Fishy, Fishy, Fishy….. Thumper and I went fishing today. The base has a nice little man made lake on it with a boat dock and picnic areas. They stock it with trout and catfish and there are bass and several varieties of perch. You have to pay 15 dollars for a season pass (they use the money to stock the lake) and you don’t have to have an Ohio fishing license. We usually try to go on weekdays when I am off work as it is usually not crowded. Today we got there about 10:30 and stayed about 4 hours. I caught a really nice trout in the first fifteen minutes and thought we were going catch lots more. Unfortunately the fish did not cooperate after that. I did catch 4 small perch but I didn’t keep them. Thumper didn’t have any luck at all today and we only saw one other person catch a fish. Fortunately the one trout was big enough for me to make a meal out of. Thumper doesn’t really like trout anyways so we picked her up a steak and I grilled both the fish and the steak. With some fried rice and corn on the side it made for a nice meal. I even remembered to save a little for our cat so everyone was happy.

I Was Mugged! Thumper and I live on a court. Most of our neighbors have small children. There is about a dozen kids ages 1 to 8 years old living around us. On nice days many of them play out front in the court. Thumper and I got home from a movie (we saw Mean Girls and it was really funny) and dinner at about five this afternoon. A couple of two year olds were playing in our next-door neighbor’s yard. They saw me and ran over to grab my hands and lead me to a small hill on the far side of the yard. I was soon holding them by the hands and spinning them around and watching them roll down the hill. I didn’t see the two five-year-old boys who were sneaking up behind me until they jumped me. Soon I was on my back wrestling with four of the little munchkins. Fortunately they were all ticklish so I was able to withstand their attack for about a half hour before they had to go in for dinner. I may be sore tomorrow but we had a lot of fun!