Slow News Week

As you may have gleaned from the overall paucity of blog entries over the past few weeks, I'm kinda busy. Yesterday evening on-call I was served up two tasty nephrology treats which kept me in the hospital 'til late: one a patient with the highest sodium level I had ever seen (183mmol/Liter, for those of you keeping score at home), and another a patient with a fascinating disease called thrombotic thrombocytopenia purpura (TTP), which requires repeated plasma exchange, a technique somewhat related to dialysis in which you basically have the entire liquid portion of your blood emptied from your body and then replaced with other people's donated plasma. Also relevant to me, it is also a technique which requires the presence of the renal fellow, even when it gets performed at 11pm. At least it's not dull!