Happy New Year!!

I know I'm a little bit late in my new year well-wishing, but I've been terribly busy these days. Doing what, you ask?
A whole lot of nothing! I have read a slew of really terrible books, worked several 2-day work weeks, hosted a book club, and made a fantastic beef stew. And that's about it.
I did have one little run of excitement in the new year, though. Picture this: it's January 2nd, I'm at work on an incredibly slow day at the hospital, and the day is growing towards it's close. I've even grown a little complacent, as my two whole patients have become one patient, and I'm frankly not sure how to fill my last 2 hours of shift. And then at 6:20pm, out of the karmic cosmos, comes a whirlwind. At first sight you wouldn't think it. He's 26, strong and healthy despite the appendicitis he was just operated on for, and *allegedly* making a very nice recovery following laparoscopic surgery. Every nurse's dream patient! I think, "he won't need anything for the next hour and forty minutes, I'll just get him settled and keep him comfortable. Yay me for going home on time!!". Ha!
So this lovely gentleman arrives on our floor in full-body shivers, complaining of cold despite 3 blankets and a stifling room. His shivers are so bad, in fact, that I can't get a real blood pressure reading on him because his arm is shaking so much. After giving him ten minutes or so to rest I try to recheck his blood pressure only to find that his heart rate is now 170. Hmmmm, not looking so good for him, or me, at this point. Thankfully I have an attentive resident on call that night, who came right away to assess this man and his super-fast heart rate. And then we discovered that his temperature was more than 104.8. Yup, that's as high as our thermometers go, and he's off that scale. Awesome! Several more doctors and a transfer to the post-op unit later, it's determined that he has malignant hyperthermia, which is a very rare complication of general anesthesia that causes the muscles to go rigid and drive body temperatures sky high. So then we start pushing large amounts of the antidote into him, a very lengthy process that takes just about every nurse on staff to accomplish, and transfer him again, this time to the surgical ICU. At 8pm, change of shift. After I had to convince a nurse there to take report on him so I could transfer him. And then later they tell me it's not malignant hyperthermia after all, just a really bad fever.
At this point I'm so amped up on adrenaline I don't care that I left work a good hour late.

But then things just kept getting better...
As I'm walking up my street from the subway, contemplating my crazy evening, I hear glass breaking and smell smoke. I look down the alley and what do I see? Flames, shooting out the windows of an apartment building. Yup. It keeps coming. And at this point I figure I've earned a look, so I walked around the corner and gawked. I'm pretty sure I'd earned the right to just stand around and watch the action for a few minutes!
Sadly, though, there were several families huddled in the DunkinDonuts while their home burned, so I beat it home to gather up supplies for cold weather and the very heavy looking bunny rabbit one lady was holding in a donut shop. And then back out I went, into the 17 degrees and 40mile an hour winds. And promptly delivered clothing to people who looked at me like I was absolutely out of my mind. And not in a good way... Oh, and by the way, did I have any clothes for the old guy wearing a tarp for pants? Sigh. Back I went to raid the little bit of men's clothing still left in my apartment. Did I mention how cold it was??

But that's not all. On my way back, again, to the crowd at the DD I stumble across a woman trying to detach herself from a cab, complaining that she's dizzy and doesn't know if she can walk. Well, that's right up my alley! Most of my days are tied up in "Fall Prevention and Safety", so I know the dizzy-walking speech inside out and backwards. Nurse to the rescue! To the drunkest woman in town... who I then had to assist all the way to her apartment so she didn't fall flat on her face.... as she kept whispering "shhhhh, don't tell anyone. I'm drrrruuunnnnkkkkk". No kidding! Never would have guessed.

All around quite an adventure of an evening.

What I've learned so far this year: surgeons are, in fact, incredibly hot out of their scrubs; New Yorkers are a terribly suspicious and ungrateful lot; drunk people continue to be comical, whether you've been drinking with them or not; and my life is pretty damn interesting, even when it resembles an episode of the Twilight Zone.