My worst four hours.

Last night was my first evening of call for radiology. The radiology resident reads all the "urgent" CT scans as well as covers a variety of other aspects of radiology. Every study that is urgent needs to be approved by me, and then I have to tell the techs about the study, they let me know when something is done, and I have to call the ordering physician with results. That, along with a variety of random calls leads to quite a few phone calls, although it is often manageable, and our evening shift is only four hours, then the night person comes on.

Last night, however, there was an explosion of patients in the emergency room. Emergency room care is evolving into a practice of looking for the most catastrophic cause of a persons symptoms. If someone has a headache and decides to go to the ED, they will get a CT scan of the head. Elderly patients often get infections (pneumonia or UTIs particularly) which make them a little confused. Since they are a little confused, they get a head CT (which oddly enough is normal). So an explosion of patients in the ED equals an explosion of pages for me.

A typical phone call would last 30 seconds to a minute. In that time I would usually get paged two more times before I hung up. The obnoxious call was when they would ask when I would look at so and so's study and I would like to say "As soon as people stop paging me!!"

The resident who came on for the overnight shift after me had an equally busy time (for the two hours I stayed catching up on reports, hopefully it slowed down eventually) and he said it was the worst night he has ever had. It was not a good first night of call.

The Perks of Radiology

Nathan has been on Ultrasound the past month. Since he started I have been after him to sneak me in for an ultrasound. So finally on Wednesday after work the kids and I met him and we got to see our new little one. Nathan had to run the machine and I was on the bed, so the kids had free reign of the room. They were mostly good about not destroying it:) Our baby is growing and looking healthy. We tried and tried to determine the gender of our child, but the baby was being difficult. First the legs were crossed,then it rolled into a ball, then we ran out of time. So Nathan told me I have to wait until my real ultrasound on the 26 to find out if it's a boy or girl. Bummer. I really wanted to know. Oh well. We'll let you know if the baby cooperates on the 26!

Brrrrr!!!!

I had the great privelege of going camping with the scouts this weekend. I'm an assistant scoutmaster and the YM president (who stayed warm at home (he was sick)) placed me in charge. The scouts met with several other leaders just as I was getting out of work in a town about 30 minutes away from me (all of this within our large ward boundaries), so they went to the campsite without me and I picked my way out there in my little prism on a one lane road that has no winter maintenance.

When I arrived the scouts were putting up a tarp shelter. No fire had been started, it was snowing, and it was getting dark quickly. Groan. I helped finish setting up the shelter and we turned our attention to the fire. That's when I learned one reason why I should not meet everyone at the campsite. Nobody brought dry firewood (one leader supposedly had dry wood that he was bringing). He brought dry kindling, but we had to start a fire with snow and ice covered wood from the ground. It took a good two hours to get a decent fire going. (It worked a lot better in the morning).

During this time, the boys realized that nobody brought tents (reason two for never letting the scouts arrive at the campsite without me). I thought it would be a great lesson for them to figure out their own shelter for the night. Fortunately they have a scoutmaster with charity who left for home (he can't camp away from home for health reasons) and drove back to the campsite with tents. The scouts quickly put their tents up on the slope of a hill right at the edge of our tarp shelter (remember it's still snowing). I put up my little 3/4 man tent a little away from the boys. The other two adult leaders slept in their vehicles.

I could not sleep. I haven't camped in the snow for a very long time. I soon remembered that having slightly wet clothes is not good for winter camping. My ski hat was wet and the neck of my shirt were wet. I was cold!!! I changed my clothes, but unfortunately my sleeping bag was probably rated for cold weather 20 years ago when it was new. It didn't keep me very warm. I also should have had another inch of foam underneath me. Remember that 3/4 man tent I was in, I couldn't stretch my legs straight. My knees were sore.

After starting to drift off to sleep I heard a WHOOSH sound that brought me back awake. Our tarp shelter finally collapsed under the snow. I had to check on the boys to make sure it hadn't fallen on them (since they were at the edge of the shelter). It fell the other way. I was satisfied. It was 2:45 am.

At 6:30 I gave up and got dressed and went and sat in my car while the layers of ice melted off of my body and my core body temperature returned to a level that supports biological processes. The morning was quite warm. The boys had drifted down their slope like a glacier. They managed to snap one of the tent poles that was sucked underneath the biggest young man. We had about four inches of new snow. It was great packing snow and we ended up having a snowball fight. We left as it started snowing. About a mile away from my exit off the freeway I was driving in a white out. I was awfully glad to finally get home.

The next day in church one of the young men reportedly said it was one of the best campouts he has ever been on. He's getting his Eagle Scout award in a couple weeks. He leaves on his mission this fall. Oddly it wasn't his first campout. I don't know what is wrong with him, but at least the boys had fun.