Orthopods

When enrolled in a family medicine residency program, the first day of every month, regardless of what day of the week it is, is always a hesitantly anticipated time. We switch "rotations," on the first, with the expectation of pivoting on a dime and doing a 180 degree turn in what you do and what you are expected to know when you get up in the morning. So, on the second of February (I had the first off....SUNDAY), I pounded my coffee and checked my schedule. Orthopedic surgery. For a month....

Now, I'm not entirely sure why my program thinks that a whole month of orthopedic surgery is a necessary thing in a family medicine program...but whatever. I have never liked ortho. I spent a month in medical school doing orthopedics. I disliked it immensely. It doesn't seem very cerebral. However, it's kind of (ok, REALLY) important to know what to do with musculoskeletal problems, so I endured it, hoping that if I forced it down my throat for long enough, it would begin to grow on me. Unfortunately, it did the opposite. I was appaled to go into the OR suite and see little bits of Marrow launching out of the patient and sticking to the ceiling in a vibrant red spray.

So, Monday morning, I headed off to St. Mary's O.R. and threw on some scrubs. Our first case was "fixing" an unfortunate man's acetabulum. The acetabulum is the socket within the pelvis where the hip bone sits. This poor 64 year old man had decided to relive his youth and got a little too agressive on the snowmobile. His acetabulum was in six pieces instead of one and he needed to get a plate in it to stabilize his hip.

Orthopedic surgery is the ultimate "man science" genre of medicine. Most orthopods (orthopedic surgeons) are big, loud, tall, husky, low-voiced, deliberate men who like to "fix stuff." The operating suite looks like a scene from Menards: screws and drills, saws, hammers, chisels, fancy glue, and an instant x-ray machine called a C-arm, so they can monitor their progress while they are scrubbed in. (Contrast this to their intellectual, introverted, skinny, comrades in internal medicine, who carefully use medications and brain power to treat patients...)

Back to our acetabulum guy. I spent most of the duration of the three-hour surgery standing above the patient's head peering over the anesthesia curtain, watching the surgeons (four of them were working on this guy...which left no room for the Resident to scrub in). There was pounding of hammers and wizzing of drills, whirring of screwdrivers, and little bits of bone marrow flying out here and there, adhering to whatever was in its path. After an hour of standing there, I got antsy. After two hours, I needed to do something to keep my mind busy. Luckily, there was some excellent man-music playing while they were working. Old School Rock. Metallica, Poision, Grateful Dead. I was brought back to my seventh grade rebel days when I actually listened to this stuff. I began to mouth the dreadful words from under my mask. I swayed to the beat, bouncing a little to keep myself from keeling over onto the anesthesiologist. It was the ultimate man-O.R. and looked a little like a scene from a car fix-it garage: a bunch of burly men, burly tools, and burly music. Except, instead of having motor oil all over the place, there was.....


ew.


I still don't love orthopedics. Maybe I'll decide that I love it today. I'd be better off loving it, at least for now. It's only Feb 5th and I have a whole month to look forward to....

Mary likes her tongue...

Ahhhh.

Two days ago, if you would have asked me what I wanted to do this weekend, the answer would have been, "go to the Cayman Islands, drink Margaritas, and read the huge stack of medical journals that incriminatingly stare at me from behind the toilet (where Mike has decided to store them.)
WELL, I can't argue, what I have been doing this weekend isn't as good as Cayman...BUT it's been one of the best, most relaxing weekends I think I've had in the last five years of my life. You see, the two anal-retentive, type-A, detail-oriented (but lovable) people in my household have left for the weekend. Yup, that's right, Mike and Julia went away...Mike to Island Camp and Julia to Grandma's. I have been alone with Mary since Thursday night. Just us two...Mama and Squish.

First of all, I don't remember having one kid be this EASY. I recall that one time Mike left me home alone with Julia for two days and I panicked. Well, those days are gone. Maybe it's because Mary is so sweet, cuddly, and almost always easy-going...or maybe I've had more practice. Regardless, this weekend has been CAKE.

Friday night, I was on medicine call. So, I packed up my baby and brought her to the hospital with me. She was supposed to spend the night with a friend, but that fell through...so it was Mama and Squish in the call room together. For the first few hours, Danielle, Dr. Tieben's wife, came and watched Mary. After that admission, just for tradition's sake, I gave her a bath in the call room sink as her sister had done so many times when she was little. When I had another admission, I lent her to the nurses in OB for awhile and dictated my notes back in the call room with a squeaking baby in the background. Mary took a liking to the bananas and the TV in the call room. She got herself all comfortable on the couch clutching a banana and watched a whole episode of Scrubs. I swear she knew what was going on. When the laughing track would play in the background, Mary would start to giggle along with them. Then, in sheer delight she would squeeze the banana so the insides squirted out the top.

This repeated itself about every twenty seconds. I never noticed how many times the laughing audience plays during Scrubs. It is a LOT.

Mary slept well on the call room floor. This morning, we shared a St. Luke's pancake and headed home. We made two different kinds of homemade bread and a cake (it was -16 and I wanted to keep the kitchen warm.) Then we ventured to ShopKo and Cub for some errands. Mary was very good until the end of our trip where she "hit critical mass" in the checkout lane at Cub. She would only stop screaming if I would hold her and bounce up and down (not little cute bounces, but full-throttle, off-the-floor leaps.) The asian cashier guy was nice to us...I think. He kept looking down at the floor with a weird smile on his face while speaking a language other than English. Maybe he was praying.....

...

Well, I just read through my post and I realized...the first part talks about what a nice relaxing day I had...and then I proceeded to tell you that I took medicine call with a baby in my room and then had another one of "those" shopping experiences. Despite what you might think, I feel pretty good right now. Perhaps it's the fact that life has been so chaotic lately that I didn't bat an eye at anything today, or perhaps it's the absence of my toddler, OR perhaps I feel good because I ate homemade bread all day and not much else except for the empty margarita glass sitting next to my computer.

Smile, girls!

Getting cute kid moments on "film" is difficult. For one, I never seem to know where the camera is. Secondly, the thing seems to go through batteries like I go through stethescopes (gone before you know it...) AND, to catch the kids in a cute moment means they have to stay cute long enough for you to find the camera and take a picture of the cuteness. Needless to say, I take what I can get...

Julia tries on her jammies from Gramma Ruth. She looks like a surgical scrub tech! Last year, she refused to wear the hat.
This one made me laugh. Papa gave Julia a lemon dessert. He then left her in the kitchen to eat it. A few minutes later when he came back downstairs, Julia commented, "it's too sour, papa." Sure enough, she had remedied the situation: observe exhibit A. The purple bowl has some remnants of yellow dessert, but it is severely obscured by the TON of sugar the toddler put on it.

and I had just refilled the sugar thing. Mmmmmm...carbs...




Below is my attempt at a Christmas card photo. This is why we have JC Penney take our pics. The girls don't look smiling aliens in the professional pictures.

The computer is fixed

Our computer is fixed.

Last week, Mike tried to turn it on and it became unresponsive. He made sure the power supply was adequate, which sounds like a simple task.....

I wondered where he had gone for two hours. Apparently, he had to check to see if the one circuit that supplies all of the outlets in our entire house hadn't blown up again....and then check power supply in the computer, and then the extension cord it's plugged into, and then check the extension cord that *that* extension cord is plugged into....and then check the thing in the socket in the wall that makes a two-prong outlet into a three-prong outlet. (Our house was built in 1928 and I don't think they were thinking that a computer, printer, space heater, electric blanket, hair dryer, two alarm clocks, a fan, two closet light things, a cordless phone, a cell phone charger, a pda charger, and a breast pump would be plugged into *the* outlet they put up here.)

After all of this trouble shooting didn't give way to any miraculous revelation, Mike decided to do what most men do: take it apart. (I need to add that he has been taking a lot of stuff apart lately. Right this minute, there are sewing machine parts all over the kitchen and dining room because he is "fixing" his sewing machine. I need to get him a heated shed or something for a birthday present. Except then I would never see him unless I promised him some food if he came back.....but let's get back to the matter at hand):

So, I had to go in to St. Luke's because I had another admission, and I get this on my pager, "mayday, mayday. the dust bunnies are here." So, I leave the patient's room and call home. Mike is hysterical.

Turns out that our computer needed Merry Maids. Mike said the dust bunnies in the computer were breeding out of control. They were filling *all* of the empty space inside the tower.Did you know that your computer has a fan running into it and another blowing air out of it? I never thought about this, but computers are basically big, expensive air filters. I wonder if they are HEPA certified? At any rate, he is surprised that the thing didn't spontaneously combust before our eyes. Can you imagine it? Sitting at your computer all happy and complacent...and suddenly, you smell a suspicious burning odor. Before you have time to react, the dust bunnies in the main tower thing catalyze an exothermic reaction and you end up with a bomb on your desk. Why don't they tell you about this when you buy a computer?

....

After Mike cleaned the thing out, filling the vaccuum with a huge gray cloud, he brought it to the computer store and bought a few new parts. Now, it sounds like an airplane taking off (apparrently the Bunnies had already taken a few victims, namely both of the fans and the power supply). The new fans are buzzing so loudly that I can't hear the kids chattering outside the bedroom door. Hmm...I'm starting to like this. I also have noticed my allergies are getting better and the air in our bedroom is fresh and clean.....

Well, I've done it. I did something I never thought I would do. Two things, actually. Dad bought Mike and I an "iphone' for Christmas, and we are slowly learning how to make good use of the things. Here's what I managed to do today:
#1: I took pictures with a CELL phone and put them ON the COMPUTER...
and....
#2: I FIGURED IT OUT by myself, without any help from the techno-husband. He actually told me not to bother trying because it wasn't possible. Ha! I laugh in the face of danger!

Not only that, I managed to sync my iphone thingy to the computer and download (upload?) "software updates." It was amazing. I just kept clicking and clicking...and pretty soon, my little gadget was sync-ing itself with the big computer... whoa. I think I need to take a deep breath. This is a big step for me. ALL of the pictures in this blog came from my phone. Our digital camera is on vacation because the little round battery inside is dead and therefore the camera is dead until we relpace it. So, from an amateur photographer to you, here some random shots from the Sprengeler household. Unfortunately, I did managed to slice this picture in half and rotate the left side up a bit. I couldn't do it again if I wanted to, but it looked kinda neat.
This is Mike, laughing at me before I "sync-ed" my iphone. HA!
Here's a cute picture of our happy, adorable baby whom we love more than almost anything
Here is the other half of the "better than sex cake" I made tonight. We ate the other half between four of us during a game of 500.
Here are some of Mary and Julia's cousins. I was still learning how to take pictures at the time. I only got Mike's grandma Schwartz's arm on the right. I also cut baby Tyler's head off on the left.. Oh, well.
Here's another picture of Miss Happiness.
Here's Mike playing with Julia's Thomas the Train set long after she had gone off to bed....
Here's a photo of "gramma Beth" reading the girls a bedtime story.
Mike's brother John and his wife Jenny came to see us for the weekend. Mike decided today was the day to take apart his old sewing machine and my mom's old sewing machine and try and make one working sewing machine out of two broken ones. Ahhh...(insert gruff male voice here) "takin stuff apart"
One more shot of Mary, albeit blurry...she has found her tongue adn LOVES to stick it out at us.