Greetings from The Hospital

Greetings from your friendly neighborhood Super SAR!

It's 3:13am (which is, for me, kinda like late afternoon with my flip-flopped schedule working the night shift) and I'm chilling out in one of the call rooms. Fortunately we're experiencing a lull in the action so I thought I'd try some on-duty blogging just to take a break.

So the Super SAR job is a little more challenging than I had originally anticipated. Not only am I the resident whose job it is to assign patients to the appropriate admitting teams, but I do end up admitting a fair number of the patients as well as "night floats" (that is, I see patients who come into the ER at night, work them, get them tucked in, and in the morning pass them off to a different resident). Tonight so far I've had some variety: an asthma, a cellulitis, and a shortness of breath which I'm pretty sure is heart failure. Yesterday night I had four chest pains and a blood clot in the leg.

I'm actually taking a 3-day hiatus from this gig--my friend Jen has agreed to cover my Super SAR shifts so that I can attend the American Society of Nephrology meeting which is taking place here in Philadelphia (I of course am paying her back later on in the year). The photo above is a dog kidney cell cyst which has been induced to form tubules by a growth factor called HGF--it's taken from my research, which I will be presented as a poster at the ASN Meeting. Should be fun!