My appendix

Pro bono, I hope.

 

Yes. Went over it pre-surgery with my wife present. Turned out the appendix also had gotten infected by everything else going on and had to come out in any case.

 

One of the worst parts about being cut open is that it throws my workouts out the window. I'm not supposed to lift more than 10 pounds for two weeks and not more than 30 or so for a few weeks after that. As I slide toward my latter third, I need all the working out I can get. Shit.

 

A sidebar story popped up on my Google News feed. Guy went to surgery to have his left testicle removed. They took the right one.

I wonder how it feels to own a hospital?


They bend over backward to prevent that kind of thing anymore. They use checklists. If say you are to have your left leg amputated a nurse takes a sharpie and writes "NO!" on both sides of your right leg. I don't know how they managed to do it, but the hospital's insurer will offer a huge settlement to keep it out from in front of a jury.

 

Maybe the testicle guy did the Sharpie thing himself but didn't account for looking from the top down.

 

OK, so maybe the oxy is a little better than I thought.

 

Live look at swingline:

 

They sawed off the correct testicle -- my left one -- but really fucked up during radiation by giving me another patient's dose, twice.

 

It's so easy to suffer a brain fart and do something wrong, especially when it's a procedure you've done hundreds of times. You let your concentration lapse a little, get distracted or talking with the patient, thinking about something else... and you screw up. Thing is that when it's medical, it's not like sawing a board an eighth of an inch too short or something.

Dosage should be a routine thing, you look at the chart and set it - but sometimes you mis-set it, or forget to change it, or you *think* you know what it was supposed to be and you're wrong.

I never did that, but I can't say that I never set up a patient and shot a chest x-ray and when I went to pull the film out realized that I had not put it in first, or took a picture of the wrong arm or something. Dumb mistake, but like I said, you're running on routine and mess up.

I'm just glad I was never responsible for the amputation of a good body part, that's a whole different level of fuckup.

 

Law & Order, man, it's really, like, important social things, like, you know, man.

 

Anyone else immediately think of Run DMC?

No? Whippersnappers! Get off my lawn!