Suicide Med on sale!

I haven't put Suicide Med on sale in a while because I've been sort of ignoring my earlier books, but I decided to do a little sale this week.  It will probably be the last one ever, so....

Get Suicide Med for less than a dollar!

Mini-blurb:

Southside Medical School is nicknamed “Suicide Med” because for each of the last six years, one student has taken his own life. Is it the heavy workload?  Is the school simply cursed?  Either way, the same question echoes through the minds of every student at Suicide Med: 

Who will be next to die?

Shooter drills

Everywhere I go, there are shooter drills.

We've had one at our hospital.  My kids have had them at school.

I'd like to say that this is a ridiculous overreaction to something that's really rare, but I can't entirely say that. Yes, it's really rare. There have been over 50 school shootings this year, which isn't very much compared with the number of schools in the country, but it's not winning the lottery rare.  It's probably more common than being involved in an airplane crash.

I just find it really depressing that the country has gotten to the point where we have to do this.  When I was a kid, we weren't having shooter drills.  There's obviously a problem, yet we've elected a President who is potentially going to loosen the gun restrictions that most people in this country want.  That's what bugs me--that the vast, vast majority of people in this country are more worried about mass shootings than they are about their second amendment rights being taken away.

I don't understand how the solution to increasing mass shootings is to teach people what to do when it happens and just accept that there's nothing we can do to stop them.

Thank you for your donation

In September of last year, I put out a collection of short stories called 11 out of 10.  I solicited contributions from readers online, and I've been selling the book for $2.99 on Amazon (of which Amazon takes a cut).  I've been donating all profits (and change) to Deworm the World Initiative, a charity that treats parasitic infections in developing countries.

So far, I have sold over 3,000 copies.  I've donated about $6,000 to this charity.

The book has been out a little over a year, and I had figured that after the first year, I'd drop the price to a dollar and just give like a thousand bucks to the charity to cover any income it might make in the future.  But considering I've still been able to donate $200/month from the book, it seems like it'd be better to just keep going!

Anyway, I want to say thank you to everyone who bought a copy or contributed.  It's pretty cool how much money the book managed to raise.

The Fire

Yesterday, I was doing laundry when I heard my older daughter screaming.  Apparently, she put something metal in the microwave and it was spinning around on the tray, shooting up orange flames.

Now I feel she's old enough to use the microwave, but at some point, everyone accidentally puts something metal in the microwave (this was a piece of shiny wrapping that food was wrapped in).  But she wasn't old enough, apparently, to know what to do when it caught on fire.

I've set small fires to the microwave before, but this was quite a dramatic fire.  And I realized that my two kids were in the house and I was the only adult.  So it was up to me to either extinguish this fire or figure out the next step.

Fortunately, the second I turned the microwave off, the fire went out.  Good thing, because I really didn't know what the next step would be for a microwave fire.  Would water make it worse, like for grease fires?  Would a towel have been better?  Clearly there was no time to google it.

Sometimes it's scary being the adult.

Any other questions

When I ask a patient, "Any other questions?", usually I mean about the stuff we've just been discussing.  But not infrequently, this is taken as an opening to ask me personal questions.  Such as:

"Where did you go to medical school?"

"Where do you live?"

"Is your hair naturally curly?"

And from yesterday:

"What is your favorite jazz song?"

That was one I literally could not answer.

Two

These were the two saddest comments I heard from my family members about the election:

From my daughter: "Well, at least Clinton won the election we had in our school."

From my mother: "I'm so excited... now we get to see what Melania Trump is wearing for the next four years!" (Not said sarcastically)

Current events

Me: "Who is the President?"

Patient: "Oh!  I know one... oh my gosh, I can just picture him..."

Me: "What does he look like?"

Patient: "Well, he has this strawberry blond hair and it puffs up over his head.  I don't know how it does that!  I think his name is... Target?"

Me: "Um, who is the current President?"

Patient: "Oh!  Yes, well, that's... hmm..."

Me: "It starts with an O."

Patient: "Oprah?"

Actually, I remember at the start of the election, people were saying that Oprah should run for President.  I was discussing this with my husband and telling him how much respect I had for Oprah, because I saw her go on some show where she was like, "What is wrong with people saying I should run for President!  I have no experience with government!  I'm totally unqualified!"

And she has great insight.

Although actually, if she were running for President against either candidate, she'd probably win in a landslide. She's really likable.  Hell, I'd happily vote for her against Trump.  She seems like a smart lady (based on not wanting to run) and she's certainly a feminist.  She seems very even-tempered and compassionate. And unlike Trump, she built her enormous empire from scratch. Actually, I'm liking this idea more and more.

My patient was right!  Oprah for President!

A Halloween Conversation

Patient: "I'm just feeling incredibly depressed about my whole situation."

Me: [thinking] "I really wish I weren't wearing fox ears right now."

A lot of staff members dressed up for Halloween this year and there was a whole theme going.  I don't usually dress up and I didn't this year either, but because everyone else was doing it, I found a really discrete pair of fox ears in my kid's room and I wore them about half the day.  Most patients either didn't notice or they seemed to appreciate my Halloween spirit. I only wore them for follow-ups, not to see new patients.

But there were one or two times when I desperately wished I didn't have them on.  And I was like, do I take them off?  Because that would call more attention to them, right?

What do you think?  Is it inappropriate for a non-pediatric physician to dress up for Halloween?

Email scandal

I was recently talking to my mother, who is at least fairly well informed about politics, and I was really surprised to learn that she didn't understand that there was a difference between Clinton's being investigated for the private server and the hacking of the DNC emails.  She thought it was all the same thing.

Husband: "At least she knows what email IS."

On discussing this more with my husband, I discovered that even I don't understand the email scandal with the private server, despite the fact that I read the news all the time.  My husband, who has worked with classified government information, asked if I could explain it and I explained it incorrectly.  

Can you explain what Clinton did wrong with her email server, if anything?