Little Pig, Little Pig, Let Me In

I may shortly be kicking down the door of my own apartment. That is if there's an apartment left for me to kick into. Despite almost half a year of waiting my fancy, shiny new apartment downtown is still not fit for living in. The latest problem? A huge water pipe apparently exploded flooding floors 6 through 9. Or something like that, it involved lots of waters and freak inexplicable accidents keeping me out of my rightful home. Perhaps it's for the best, though, God seems to have a thing against this place. I may be saving myself some heart ache, and perhaps a case of boils, if this whole thing falls apart.

Since I haven't mentioned my own current housing crisis much before let me start at the relative beginning.

A long, long time ago, feels like three years but I guess it was about 9 months, I was in the market for buying a house. I looked around, found some places, my family duly let me know they were terrible places, and so I looked around some more. Finally, I found the greatest place. Unfortunately it was around this time, shortly before starting my work as an intern, that I decided that no, in fact, I did not wish to buy a house. The appeal of free artistic license, spacious guest bedrooms to have family over in, and a backyard to build a garden upon were dshed by the reality that as an intern everything but basic hygiene gets neglected. And so I moved into the base housing. Unfortunately base housing is only free for a month (and apparently my base housing was also home to a family of fearless cockroaches), and so I moved into some friends' place. Josh and Sarah were newly weds, however, and their house was way the hell away from everything so I duly sought out alternative residence number three. That's when I found my good friend, then complete stranger, Laura Gallo. After some brief negotiations she set me up in her second guest bedroom and I was set for the next two to three months.

Or so it was to be. I had found, what I thought at least, would be the apartment equivalent of my previous dream house. The Vistana. "Lofty Living Downtown" their ridiculous and somewhat pretentious advertisement claimed. It was conveniently placed between both hospitals, in a different setting than the suburban wasteland I had been living in for 8 years, and 9 stories up giving me the wonderful sunset view I had long sought after. And all for a fairly reasonable price. Unfortunately my official move in date, mid-October came around and because of the previous spring's epic rains construction was behind schedule. I would be moving in in November. November came and again it was pushed back. Now it was December. December came and that too was wrong. We're going to play it safe and say first week of February. And what happened when the first week of February came around? "Mr. Crabtree, we're sorry but we're going to have to push back the moving date one more time. How does March 6th sound?" "March 6th? My favoritest day, sounds great."

And now we come to February 26th. I had thought maybe March 6th really would be the day. Even started planning renting a moving truck and reboxing my stuff. But now comes a pipe flood and once more I must wait. Current move in date is unknown pending further catastrophe. I am expecting either a zeppelin to broadside the place or a pterodactyl attack. I eagerly await the call.

Ahh Man, Who Dumped My Stuff?

Last week I diagnosed hypoaldosteronism all by my little old self. A turning point? Have I become a real doctor? Will I cure all disease?

The next day I dumped a glass of milk onto the kitchen floor when I tried to transfer a paper towel full of mini donuts into the same hand.

In other residency news: I have a friend who has a patient who regularly schedules appointments to see her in clinic only to talk at great length about nothing at all. Today I heard through the thin exam room walls, "... and then the preacher said, 'you are what you are because you want to be!' And I fell down and praised Jesus!" This went on at length for about 10 - 15 minutes until I heard the staff, who was apparently also in the room with my friend helping assess the gentleman, say matter of factly, "Sir. What exactly do you want us to do for you?" And the booming story continued.

Oh crazy people. What would internal medicine clinic be without you?

Where's Adam? I'll Kill Him!

First. The funniest thing I have heard in a good time. (A good time being roughly three months or a fortnight.)

While doing Board Review questions during Morning Report one day on medicine wards we got to a peculiar question:

You are given report of a a 32 year old man who awoke from sleep to find a bat lying on the floor next to his bed...

Everyone's immediate answer to the question not yet asked was, "examine the man for bat bites!" to evaluate for rabies. We thought ourselves pretty smart for knowing the connection between rabies and bats, but then we were told, as the question progressed, that he had no evidence of being bitten. So as everyone stirred briefly reconsidering their choices, someone else in the room shouted out, "examine the bat for human bites!"

I am probably the only one who laughed at that and yet I am content with it.

But to the point. Another fireworks story. Or, if you know my family, *the* fireworks story.

Some background. My birthday is the day before the Fourth of July. One year, some year that will remain unspecified in a place unspecified, my brother and a cousin of mine, Matthew, decided to light some of our firework stash off the day before in celebration. It was all uneventful till we got to one particular firework, the UFO.

The story. I am still not sure what the UFO is. I suppose that's why it's called the UFO. It appeared to just be a brick with a fuse. Or maybe a deck of cards wrapped in a cheap wrapper with a small rubber dome on one side and piece of string dangling from the other. Whatever it was, not knowing what it was or what it would do did not stop us from lighting it. First the fuse burned down slowly as one would expected. Then, while on the ground, it began spinning tight circles on the cement not as one would expect. And finally, as it was inevitably going to do, it shot off straight into the sky with such speed that we really had no idea which direction it flew off into. It did this, however, only after bursting into flames. That, it turns out, is a UFO.

Concerned that sending a ball of fire into the air on a warm summer day could be potentially dangerous we temporarily stopped our firework lighting festivities and set about the yard and surrounding area looking for any signs of its remains. After about 5 - 10 minutes of completely uneventful searching we decided that no answer was a good answer and so resumed our previous activities. It would be another 10 - 15 minutes before we heard a middle aged Hispanic woman call out from the street below, "Sir! Sir! Your house is on fire!"

I was apparently the only one who heard the lady because I was the only one who looked up to see that, indeed, a small patch of our roof was going up in flames. I passed word on to my brother and cousin and off we were to find whatever it was we could find to put it out. For my brother and cousin that meant grabbing the hose and throwing my cousin onto the roof. For me that meant running for the fire extinguisher I remembered seeing in the camper out in front of the house. For the roofer that just happened to be passing by and somehow saw the smoke, that meant leaping over the fence and joining my cousin atop the burning shingles. Despite all the immediate excitement it was a relatively tiny fire, maybe a foot by two or three feet, and it was quickly doused by the unstoppable combination of garden hose and fire extinguisher. Within a few minutes the excitement was over. The firefighting, however, apparently was not.

We watered the embers a bit more, poked around a bit, and then waited for our family to come home. The Super Roofer gave us some advice, gave us his card, and then promptly went back to his secret lair. It was about twenty to thirty minutes before anyone got back, that being my brother-in-law Patrick. With my brother conveniently in the bathroom at the time it was left to me and my cousin to inform him of the news. "Ok, Patrick. Don't freak out, but we had a small problem. We kind of lit the roof on fire -- but we put it out it's ok!" His immediate response? "Adam! Did Adam do this?! I'll kill him!" We calmly explained that we were all collectively guilty and so, in time, he calmed down. It was now time to call the firefighters apparently. I am not sure why this was necessary -- the fire had been out for a good half hour -- but call the fire department we did, and in no time they were out, atop the roof, and carving a 6 foot by 4 foot hole in it.

The threat of fire was still not over with, though. After the crashing of fire hatchets came the flow of hundreds of gallons of water pouring through the now gaping hole and, as it saturated and then tore through the ceiling, into the dining room. And so the day was saved. Or made entirely worse I suppose we will never know. Either way, their jobs being done the fire fighters went back to their secret lair, we were given a stern talking to by the fire marshal, and that was that. That evening we celebrated my birthday at the Spaghetti Factory, and enjoyed ourselves some spumoni ice cream. A month later my family had a new roof and new set of recessed track lighting. The firefighters, I'm sure, enjoyed swinging their axes at things. Everyone agreed, it was the best birthday ever.