Dedicated to Dedicating

National Jewish is dedicated. Both in the sense that its healthcare personnel are dedicated to patient care and in the more literal sense, that everything is dedicated by someone to something. Everything.

Got too many awards? Put 'em on a plaque. Got too many award plaques? Put them in a stack on the wall. 



The last plaque is the award for the faculty member with the most awards.

Stack of plaques still insufficient? Use them as wallpaper.

If you rearrange the plaques into the correct order a secret passage opens up. Leading to a room with more plaques.

 

Of course it's not all just about the plaques at NJH. They've also got dedicated bricks.

Dedicated bricks are just like dedicated plaques, but with more Old World charm.

 

And dedicated bricks with plaques.

The greatest honor is getting a brick made out of plaques.

 

Since apparently one can run out of bricks to dedicate there's always plant life and local fauna.

The best woody shrubs are always dedicated first.

Dig donors don't trifle with pea gravel and compost, though. They go straight to dedicating buildings. Unfortunately buildings tend to run out pretty fast. So why not dedicate... parts of buildings?

Best damn vital signs room in the country.

 

 

I guess one should look at all the dedications and memorials as a sign of people's trust in the institution to use their resources wisely and for the benefit of future generations, and less as some over the top onstentatious display or kickback to the plaque-making industry. NJH certainly does good work. It is a little distracting, though. And just a little ridiculous.

 

 

"I dedicate this picture in the name of Mars. Ooh isn't that lovely?"

Fighting the MAC Attack

Denver is home to many of the nation’s great medical institutions including National Jewish, its preeminent boutique hospital. Once a center for TB excellence, with the near eradication of TB in the US it has had to move on to other mycobacterium and other lung diseases to remain relevant. It is therefore now also the nation’s best MAC (Mycobacterium avium-complex) hospital, and provides both an award winning breadth of care and an award winning mani-pedi. 

I spent four weeks there to learn all about Mycobacterium: its likes, its dislikes; hopes, dreams; everything. Having a particular interest in tuberculosis I figured I’d get an excellent education on the whole family of bugs in general, with a little bit of TB on the side to keep me interested. Instead, it was pretty much all MAC. There certainly was some M. abscessus masquerading as MAC and an interesting other NTM here or there, but there was essentially no TB and essentially nothing but MAC. MAC, MAC, MAC. Soooo much MAC.

MAC for those unaware, is America’s great undocumented plague. It’s in your jacuzzi, it’s in your shower, it’s in your pool. It’s probably sleeping with your wife. It’s also in the environment as well, and we all likely eat and breath it every day, but for some reason a very small – exceedingly small – portion of the population gets permanently infected with it and develops disease. They are, largely, the Lady Windermere population. There’s also a classic subset of tobacco-smoking, beer-drinking, middle-aged males who get it, but they’re a minority at National Jewish. Instead the Lady Windermeres are thin, tall, middle-aged Caucasian females historically with a tendency towards fastidiousness, but now, all too frequently, a tendency for breast augmentation surgery.* They are what keep NJH’s engines moving.

At Denver’s national Lady Windermere health center and spa, men and women are scheduled for two week stay where they get their MAC treated, their comorbidities managed, and explore all that cosmopolitan Denver has to offer. While there they get the attention of a personal physician dedicated daily to their care for (just about) as long as they want. Consultants, dietitians, and masseuse are readily on hand. The laboratory is ready to run a generous and likely excess number of tests. And top Michelin rated chefs prepare the day’s specials in the facility cafeteria. Although at a hospital patients are not actually hospitalized, but instead spend their nights at any one of many luxurious local accommodations. Throw in a novelty T-shirt and a romantic dinner for two the final night of their stay, and the boutique experience is complete.

Because the NJH MAC ExperienceTM is so long and intensive it is typically the realm of those who can afford to stay in a hotel for two weeks and receive countless tests and procedures. In other words, it is the affluent portion of the Lady Windermeres who make it to Denver for care. Thankfully both cash and credit are accepted. 

As much as I give it a hard time, National Jewish is an amazing place. The thoroughness of care and the research being done there are remarkable. Although it does attract the rich for financial reasons, the poor and underserved are present as well. Moreover the physicians and nurses who work there are dedicated, hardworking, and give much of their lives to their patients. It’s likely entirely unreproducible due to the realities of medical finance in the rest of the world -- and perhaps with some of its excesses this is for the best -- but truly there is no institution that can compare. NJH is a place like no other. At least that's what all the travel agents say.


*It is apparently a well known, but unscientifically established, fact among radiologists that the positive predictive value (PPV) of breast implants for MAC in a woman with right middle lobe and lingular bronchiectasis is high. Similarly, male nipple rings in a chest CT? Diagnostic of HIV.**

**This is not meant to slander HIV+ individuals or men who like nipple rings. Just radiologists. What louts.

Surviving the Colorado Curse

Steep atop Denver International’s darkest crag lies perched, peering, seeing, watching: the cursed stallion.

 

With beady red eyes, bulging blue veins, and a nasty bite he haunts the mile high city. All who fly into Colorado’s newest, great airport are cursed. Cursed with a terrible curse.

I myself was afflicted by the apocalyptic hell beast, and it began the day prior to my arrival – a tribute to its cursiness. An innocents night sledding was ended tragically by my left knee bending in half the way nature never intended. Contributing factors may have included sledding from the top of a three hundred plus yard sledding hill, a small craft advisory, and a near complete lack of prior sledding experience; nevertheless, I was without warning catapulted from my sled and onto my left leg which promptly collapsed like papermache. I additionally somehow got a road rash on my right forearm from the experience, the stallion!

A few days later transgressions continued when I learned my four-week clinical “elective” would actually be four weeks of 12 hour days, tedious dictations, and regular floggings. I had hoped to commute to the hospital via bus or carpool with a friend, but the partial ACL tear, mild MCL sprain, mild LCL sprain, patellar-tibial contusion, and gastrocnemius strain all limited the feasibility of the former while working till the darkest dark of night limited the feasibility of the latter. Eventually I was forced to rent a car for the mere sum of a whole hell of a lot more than advertised.

Paying about 3 times more than listed for taxes, fees, and any lick of insurance coverage was actually one of the few fortuitous decisions I made, however, as within 2 days of acquiring the new car – and 5 days from my original sledding accident – a young woman decided to drive into the side of it. Her initial reaction to pulling out into traffic and hitting my front bumper consisted of “why didn’t you stop?!” as if in the US -- or anywhere on any planet for that matter -- it’s perfectly acceptable to make left hand turns in front of rapidly oncoming automobiles whenever you want. Once her boyfriend pointed out this was insanity she then fell back to exclaiming, “it’s not my fault!” endlessly until the police finally came. My reward for this? A new car and a significantly more expensive new rental car contract. Curse you cursed stallion!

I had to lay low for the next few weeks while the jinx passed, and was thankfully sheltered by my friend Adam and Kate in their basement under an alias. They thankfully are exceedingly generous hosts, Kate’s cooking exceedingly delicious, and their children exceedingly prone to hop merrily in place at the slightest provocation. Aside from some additional difficulty finding dry cleaning – I eventually had to go to Denver’s Korea Town – and a general lack of improvement in range in motion of my knee, things began to blow over. Unfortunately a final blow came the final week when an unknown assailant struck down Dara their slouchier, whiter dog. Some say it was a veterinarian putting an old, good dog down to her final resting place. Others say it was that stallion. And still others say it was the stallion posing as a veterinarian. All that’s clear is that through Dar-Dar’s sacrifice the curse was lifted. Or it just went away on its own. Curses are weird like that. The boys were saddened by the loss of their beloved pet, but after determining she had gone down into the pits of the Earth to doggy heaven and that they’d likely be getting another, younger dog in the future they decided they were ok with their other remaining pets. They eventually returned to hopping, and after working far more than I ever cared to on an elective, I flew home away from the demon's stare.

This post is dedicated to Dar-Dar. The best old, white dog I have ever known. We'll miss you girl.

 En memorum.

This photo is an approximation. I do not actually have a photo of Dara, but she looked kind of like this. But older.