Yes I am

still alive and kicking. I've been sick over the weekend and I actually took Monday off, partly because it's just annoying to be blowing your nose every few seconds but mainly because I just don't want to be responsible for a ton of ID consults on patients and staff just about a week from now.

When I did work last week though I kept surprising myself by having a lot of answers during discussions and rounds. Especially with this one attending that "rounded" with us at his desk (much like the very first renal attending). He was a stud, appeared very young and overflowing with confidence, obviously was working out and judging from the pictures in his office he had his trophy wife tucked away (OK now I'm going a bit too far). Obviously, he was knowledgeable - you don't become an attending for nothing here. So while rounding in his office with Missy and the female intern on the team as soon as I started presenting my patient he'd say that we were going to have a "guy discussion" from now on, which apparently meant that we'd leave political correctness and etiquette aside - which was very refreshing and fun.

I didn't see much of that attending - he only filled in for the regular one that day. But from what I have experienced and heard about him I guess he is an extremely - maybe overly - confident guy that will be your best friend and not worry too much about taking care of patients himself as long as everything goes well. Apparently though, the yelling starts if ever things go south and he may ultimately be made responsible for something he should have taken more care of. So he's a nice, extremely suave and cool guy and he does seem to know his stuff but I still wouldn't want him as my attending - whether I'm on his team OR his patient.

But like I said, my experience with him was brief.

Over the weekend, like I said, I was sick and didn't do much except raiding the pharmacy for cold medication that turned out to be placebos for the most part - including the facial tissues. The stuff they sell there really is a very bad joke. Unless you use at least three of those tissues at once you might as well blow your nose into your hand directly. While at home with my headache I did get started typing down an exposé of the mentoring project the Chicago group has been working on. As of last night, it was up to 10 typed pages, I'm still waiting for the rest of the group to read it and sign off on it so we can pass the first drafts on to the good people in Boston and Munich. But I have high hopes for the next project meeting tonight at 6pm.

In other news, the service has been very light these past days and I was able to attend a lot of conferences today. Among them was a so-called "code review" where they discussed a few of the Dr. Cart (=cardiac arrest) calls that had happened during the past week. Primarily, I learned two things: one is that they actually physically record their resuscitations. This includes the patient's EKG, ventilations, depth and frequency of chest compressions and even audio - audio! as in what the team is saying around the patient as they are coding them. That is so cool! The software gives you a full report, placing EKG reading, respiratory curves, chest compressions, end-tidal CO2 as well as information on whether or not the patient had a pulse at the time on time-synced visual graphs with the option of playing the audio at any time. That's so awesome for discussing what went right or wrong during the traditionally hectic conditions of a code situation which is exactly what they did. We have to have this in Germany.

And the other thing that I learned today was actually another piece of evidence that Americans are crazy. In a nice presentation on the benefit of post-code hypothermia the ED presenter mentioned this report, where investigators placed nine healthy volunteers (read: medstudents) under general anesthesia (yes, intubated and all!) to infuse them with ice water and see how their temperature drops. If you don't believe me, click on the link. Combine this with the concept of fecal transplants and you have definite proof beyond any reasonable doubt that these people are loco.

Allright, I'm going to let you go for now. I'll be done with the hospital exactly a week from today and flying back to Germany two days after that.

There are two things you should be able to expect from me during the upcoming days .. one should be a comprehensive review of the two months I've spent here and another should be a discussion on what the heck I want to do with my life (you definitely don't have to read the latter).

Blog to you later.