Archive for August, 2007

Dan’s wacky fish adventure

Friday, August 17th, 2007

I want to preface this story with the vital piece of information that Dan read about Aldi grocery stores on the internet. Growing up, these were the most ghetto grocery stores, but he really wanted to check it out. It smells in there. It smelled back in the day, and it still smells. I gave it a shot for his edification, but I’m not going back.

Anyhoo, we were enjoying a very delicious dinner of Aldi frozen salmon, cooked with fresh herbs and lemon, broccoli and pattypan squash from the farmer’s market in sage butter, and something else that was very very good (this was a couple of weeks ago now). After dinner, Dan started hacking and coughing, making that sound like “kack” that never bodes well. I asked him if he had a hairball. He said, “I think I have a sage-ball. There’s something caught in the back of my throat.” We watched a movie, Dan kacking away the whole time. I feared that he would be emotionally scarred by the experience and never let me cook with sage again.

Bedtime rolled around, and Dan shut himself in the master bath, seemingly to have some privacy while he dealt with his pharynx. After much kacking and no small amount of gagging, a muffled voice came from behind the door, “It’s a fishbone.”

“WHAT?”

He came out and described for me his experience of having tweezed out, with thumb and forefinger, a two inch fishbone which he discovered bobbing at the back of his throat when he looked in the mirror. My response to this was twofold:
1) This is why it’s important to chew your food
2) We’re not going back to Aldi

By the way

Tuesday, August 14th, 2007

I forgot to describe what it’s like teaching the med students. In a word: satisfying. It lets me know that I’ve actually learned something in the intervening years since I was in their shoes. Also, they help me get my work done. The best thing about them, though, is that when I say things, they write them down. I’ve never had this happen to me before. It’s very flattering. Everyone should have one of these.

And then I threw up

Tuesday, August 14th, 2007

This morning, I picked up a patient who had been admitted overnight for massive facial swelling. Turns out, he had a crown on his left front tooth that came off at some point and was now infected and, by turns, infecting half his face. Ok, cool. This’ll be interesting. I grabbed my favorite med student and we went to check him out. I saved looking in his mouth for last, so I wouldn’t forget to listen to his heart and all the other basic important stuff. When it came time, I asked him to show us the infected tooth. He lifted his upper lip to reveal a tannish, pointed stump of tooth, but that’s not even the gross part. As I was angling to get a good look at the tooth itself, what can only be described as a blorp of stuff came out of the area where the former root of the tooth was. It was pinkish and kind of thick. It was all I could do to hold breakfast in. Bleah.