On Street Sweeping and Other Musings

It was a light-ish day on frozen sections so I had some time to ponder a few random things. An update on my last post about ENT surgery: we have had more eyeballs arrive, so it seems that enucleation is done at least somewhat frequently here by them. There is an Eye Pathology department that some of the eyes seem to go to. But it is unclear to me when they go and when they do not. Hence the reason why we sometimes get to cut them up. Yuck.

I was driving in the other morning and there was so much traffic approaching the hospital. It was just bizarre. Looking ahead I realized that the street sweepers were out since it was within the designated street cleaning time. And driving all around me were huge vehicles--SUVs and trucks. After a few minutes of inching slowly along the street, I suddenly realized that all of the SUVs and trucks were circling the block and waiting for the street sweeper to move on. Then they were swooping in to claim the few spots that were large enough for their huge vehicles. It seemed pretty cut-throat. I have always wondered how people can deal with owning large vehicles in the city and parking them on the street. Now I see it can be quite the sport a couple of mornings a week.

My best frozen section of the day involved being called down to the OR long before the specimen was ready. As I stood there waiting, I watched chaos unfolding around me. It seemed this surgeon was driving the nurses crazy by making constant demands. They were running in circles trying to meet all of the surgeon's requests, which held up the frozen even longer because I could not get the specimen and leave. Finally, the surgeon realized I was still standing there and demanded to know, "what are you still doing here?" "I'm waiting for the specimen."

Now he got pissed. He started yelling at at the circulating nurse, "why is she still waiting? What are you doing? Go and get the specimen and give it to her. I need this analyzed and time is being wasted." One of the scrub nurses chewed him out a bit, "maybe if you stopped asking him to get you so many things, he could get the specimen ready!" I was happy to get the specimen and get out of there as the fireworks started,

Then we get the frozen done quickly, diagnose cancer, and I run down to the OR with the results. The freaking case is done and the patient is in the recovery room already! Yeah, that frozen was really so important for the outcome of the case. How fitting.