I'm a freaking idiot. I started my first day on heme/onc...that means I see really sick kids with cancer. One of my kids is anemic, i.e. his blood cell level is low and I need to figure out what is going on. The guys in the lab drew some blood from my patient and made a slide so that I can take a look at the red blood cells. If they look funny and have bites taken out of them, I can tell that the cells are getting beat up in the veins, rather than my guy bleeding out. Anyhow, after looking at the slide, I sprayed some windex on my slide to clean it off. We usually put oil on the slide so that we can look at the image in higher resolution. In addition, they normally put a little piece of glass on the slide so that the stuff on the slide is protected. Anyway, when I prayed windex on my slide, my sample literally started dripping off the slide and half the blood ended up on my tissue. I was like...holy shit...I slowly put the slide down and slowly backed away. Damn...I just know I'm gonna hear about this tomorrow.
On a more serious note, today was overall a pretty miserable day. These kids are really sick, and they feel like crap. It's unlike any other organic problem. Broken bone? easy, lets tape it together. Infection? easy, throw some bug poison at it. Arthritis, take an aspirin and call me in the morning. Cancer...it's like this nebulous monster. You never really know what it is. You read about it, but you never really understand it. If you're working as a general doctor, some guy has cancer, you say oh shit, then send him to the specialist. It's kinda different when you're the specialist...you say oh shit. Then you sit there while your patient can't breathe and the babies down the hall are literally screaming their heads off all day cuz they're in pain...until the drugs kick in. Then they wake up, and it starts all over. I have no idea what I'm doing. I literally read all day, and at the end of the day, I'm no wiser than when I first started.
It's gonna be a long two weeks.
-bender
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