Some of you may have known that Thursday the 2nd of April was my birthday. Not many people remembered, but that’s mainly because I don’t tell people, and sites like Facebook and Friendster (who the heck still uses that?) are set not to display my birthdate. My housemates, Sarah and Dewi found out about it when Sarah and I were talking about car insurance of all things.

So on Thursday we planned to go out for dinner, the 3 of us, at Hamilton. We settle for an Italian restaurant. The food was pretty good and the portions were big, though the service could have been a little better, but I’m attributing that to the fact that they were busy, though, that being said, the manager (who Dewi insists is gay) was somewhat rude and abrupt with us, especially insisting that we sit on the outside concourse that ran alongside the restaurant despite there being an empty table inside. However we didn’t really complain much about having to sit outside as we noticed that it was much cooler (temperature wise) to sit outside. The people sitting inside were fanning themselves. The main reason we were reluctant to sit outside was because moments earlier we had seen an insect that was the size of my entire thumb that just looked plain scary, and none of us had any idea what it could have even been! Sarah and I both had pasta while Dewi had a salad. All in all, the food was pretty good, though in my opinion the pasta was a little too dry, but it was negligible.

Of course, their company was invaluable. The 3 of us had a great time talking about all kinds of stuff, from just plain crap to some really interesting topics, like how doctors interact with and treat patients in the ED.

We went late for the dinner though. I was supposed to be out of there by 330 since I started at 7am (630 actually but who’s counting?) but I was running late as it is, and at about 4pm+, as I was about to leave, a nurse came up to me and told me that patient X was turning blue on the fingertips and was hard to awake. Knowing this patient’s history, I ran to him, double checked the nurse’s findings. Seeing as he was already on 4L of oxygen, but was having a normal respiratory rate, blood pressure and temperature, the blue fingertips didn’t make much sense, until I saw the med chart and saw that he was on an opioid which normally wouldn’t cause any trouble at that dosage, but in him, apparently it was knocking him out.

Seeing as he wouldn’t be dieing anytime soon, I ran to find the reg, who was in surg, she told me what to do, I did it (blood gases, x-ray, cease medications) and got back to her. Taking the blood gases proved to be a pain, but luckily Sarah (who has been simply awesome, staying back for me while I get my job done so that I can grab a ride in her car as opposed to taking a 1 hour long bus ride) helped me and managed to get the blood gas sample from him.

All that being done, I paged the evening resident, who promptly came over and handed over to her the case. (The patient was fine after that, and is home now. He was admitted for another reason though, which has since been treated.)

Then, I left my first overtime at the hospital for my birthday dinner.

Note: Yes, the title may be a bit misleading, the patient wasn’t likely to die at ALL but hey, its my blog and I’ll name it however I want to!