Thoughts on the cost of tea in China?

Everyone's in trouble if I could ever find a way to post music on this thing. I have "Sweet Escape" by Gwen Stefani stuck in my head. I went to her concert on Saturday and it was great. Since then, I've had every song of hers stuck in my head. It probably doesn't help that I downloaded her CD and have been listening to it. I know, I'm acting like a 13 year old girl, but it lifts my spirits so I'll do what I want :-) Anyways, I was surprised. The tickets were $9 so I didn't expect a whole lot. JM went with me and we met up with my friend Tom from RT school and his friends. I ran into Courtney and tried to find her later...but boo hoo. Sorry, I'm off track again. Gwen was incredibly entertaining. We're talking costumes and choreography...the works. Best $9 I've spent in a LONG time!

Today I had my last day at this "particular" hospital till Tuesday. I definitely needed this break. I have to admit, today wasn't as bad. I had a MUCH better preceptor. An unbelievably better preceptor. And, more importantly, no prisoners!!! I had some messed up patients, but none of them displayed unacceptable behavior.

We had a couple of patients up in the burn unit, which is I believe the only one in Indiana. I must've sighed and said "poor guy" a million times. That's all you could do. The worst one we had was working and a furnace exploded. Over 90% of his body was burned...and burned down to the muscle. Do you know how they make your non-burned skin cover more area on your body? They cut it off and put it through a mesher. What's a mesher? Exactly what it sounds like. It stretches and meshes the skin. There were a few areas where they were able to do it on him and it literally looked like mesh material over him with those tiny little open triangles. That skin will grow fast enough and fill the triangles and now more of his open wounds are covered! Having so much of his body surface burned there is not enough intact skin to work with. They have to take a couple of his skin cells and grow them in a petri dish. After at least 4 weeks, the skin has grown enough to be put over some of the burns. It's this huge, long and expensive process, but it seems to work miracles. They had a lady in there earlier this year who was schizophrenic and poured gasoline all over and then set herself on fire. After 4 months in this burn unit, she WALKED out of the hospital. Amazing.

One of the patients had me cracking up though. I felt ok about laughing because he wasn't in pain and nothing was too wrong with him, he just gave me a much needed laugh. He's in the burn unit but almost completely healed. They can even keep his door open which means his body can handle the bacteria that could infect the wounds that are open. Anyways, we got a call that his level of consciousness was regressing and they couldn't figure out why. We did an arterial blood gas and the results showed that the amount of oxygen in his blood was remarkably low (normal range is 60-80 and his was in the 20's). This happened because he was breathing very shallowly and slowly, so his body basically just wasn't getting enough oxygen into his system. When that happens, you do start to lose consciousness and in this case, hallucinate. He had me rolling. When I first walked in he yelled "Why aren't they chasing you?" I asked him to explain and he said that the wolves have been chasing him for hours, but as soon as I walked in the room they sat down. I told him I had a special bond with wolves. While I'm switching him to a stronger oxygen mask, he asks me what I think about the cost of tea in China. No joke. I said I wasn't really sure and he started going off on the subject. Ok, even in my normal state of mind I could never come up with a whole conversation of the cost of tea in China. Granted, all that he was saying may have just been jibberish, but it sounded real to me! As I was walking out of the room I told him he needed to relax and take deep breaths. He told me he wouldn't have trouble doing that if the orange box with teeth outside of his room would stop staring at him. What was hilarious was he wasn't even upset by these things, just very matter-of-fact.

I guess that's my rambling for the day...I really need to go to bed. I have tomorrow off but need to run some errands and accomplish SOMETHING...ANYTHING. Then I'm driving down to JM's for the weekend and we're having a yard sale to get rid of his junk. Oh, sorry honey, I mean his treasured possessions which aren't going to make their way up to our new apartment.

Happy Friday!