Ups and downs

Hello, reader.

Today, I heard something nice and something really disgusting.

Which do you want to hear first?

The disgusting thing?

I knew it. So, here goes.

As probably 90% of the readers of this blog know, you can get antibiotics-associated colitis if you eradicate your normal intestinal bacterial "flora" by ingesting antibiotics. If you're unlucky, one of those buggers that is normally suppressed by its peers, called Clostridium difficile, takes over your gut and gives you nasty diarrhea.

This wasn't the bad part. This review from the Annals of Internal Medicine lists the different treatments for C. diff-colitis. One of the items on the list is - I kid you not - something called "fecal transplant". This is explained as "30-50g fresh stool from healthy donor (LOL! "donor"!) in normal saline delivered by enema or nasogastric tube".

In English: They shove somebody else's crap down your throat (I guess you're lucky it's going to be inside a tube), in order to give you all the "healthy" bugs that'll eventually heal your diarrhea.

Thank you! I'll stay with actimel.

Who the heck came up with this .. crap? How do you ask a patient for consent to give them a "fecal transplant" from a healthy "donor"? Who "donates"? The physician maybe? Is that revenge for the old times when our profession had to taste patients' urines to diagnose diabetes?

Wuah. Bah.


OK, now on the nice thing I was told today.

The new attending we've been rounding with since yesterday shot the question at me today whether it was true that I wanted to go into emergency medicine. After I cautiously confirmed that, she yelled "Don't!". A little worried, I asked why. She answered "you're too smart to go into EM. And what's that I hear about anesthesia? Don't even think about that either." :D

I tried to suppress my gleaming and immediately went into my tirades about all those lying Americans and how you could never trust them when they give you a compliment.

But these past days have been good. I'm not afraid of kidney disease anymore.