With the feeling of awe from my end that the past year has flown by so quickly, it is now Christmas morning. Since my family is a big distance away from where I live, I ended up spending Christmas Eve with my roommate's family. It was a great party involving card games, Xbox, and of a massive seven course meal. I learned that a straight does not beat a flush in poker, I still get motion sickness playing first person shooter games, and that fois gras is fatty liver. We ended staying until 3:30am, but thankfully my internal clock was offset anyway from being on call the previous night. I am feeling a little sleepy right now though.

I am about to head off to church now for Christmas service with a group of post-call residents, so we will be a group of very bleary eyed miscreants among the people celebrating Christmas,

I'm really thankful that this week as gone well so far. Everything has gone smoothly, and I feel like I'm ready to wrap up the year.

I was on call at the hospital on Sunday and it was really quiet during the daytime. I pretty much sat around the hospital all day long, read about random medical topics, and finished a presentation for Monday.

At 11:00pm, I got paged to see my first consultation that day on a patient who was in the intensive care unit (ICU) for the kidney service (nephrology). The patient had been septic at another ICU for a week, and had already been assessed by a number of more senior residents and staff at our hospital. Pretty much, no one knew what was causing the patient's problem, and they just wanted to see if anyone could figure it out.

I walked in there telling the other residents that I was just a junior resident and not normally on the nephrology (kidney) team, but was only covering for their patients over night. (I am on the blood/hematology team right during weekdays). I honestly thought that I had nothing to offer. While examining the patient, there was a very subtle heart murmur that nobody else had heard. I suggested an echocardiogram (ultrasound of the heart) to look for an infected heart valve and went to sleep.

The next morning, I saw straight-forward patient in the emergency department, and then went to do my presentation. The presentation went well, and I was done call and ready to go home. I stopped by the ICU on the way out of the hospital to check on the patient that I had seen the other night. The echocardiogram report was back, and it turns out the patient had infective endocarditis (heart valve infection). Score one for my ears.

As a bonus, clinic today went really smoothly and ended early. I got home at 3:00pm ate junk food for lunch and took a nice long nap.

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Claus Claus, Santa Claus

This is a test update.

Well then, the website is back up, and nearly functioning. The old website went down sometime in August, and was updated sporadically on a blank page. Just over 3 months later, it is back. There is still stuff to do, like build a new forum and guestbook, and bug test all the sections. I am just happy to have thing up and running again.

The holidays are coming up. As residents, we were given the choice of working either during Christmas or New Years. I ended up picking New Years off. Next year I hope to get Christmas off. Well, now that's random.