Me.at Work

Alexis writes from the Veteran's Hospital:

I'm waiting for one last patient, who needs an infected port dissected out of his neck. A nasty, bloody, purulent procedure. Imagine someone had threaded a shoelace through a steak, and then let the steak rot. And then you got to try to remove the shoelace while doing as little damage to the steak as possible. The OR case was interesting, though. And only one - the other was canceled because the both the vascular surgeon and the interventional radiologist who were the team for these cases today were up all night handling an emergency (an angio case that ended with rupture of the patient's iliac artery - the magic marker sized pelvic artery - requiring desperate emergency surgery). The angio guy was up until 4 am. The surgeon was up until, well, now, and he still has stuff to do. So you know what? I really have no reason to feel bad. Busting ass is what doctors do.