letter Feb 4 2008

Dear Everyone,
Some have ‘greatness’ thrust upon them. And some have that greatness thrust upon them while kicking and screaming. I am horrified to report to you that our department’s director of surgical pathology, Dr. Hammadeh, has decided to resign to go to a private practice job. He was not very happy here in the last few months - - first due to the fiasco with the frozen section suite in the new ORs, but moreover, the fact that he was forced to drop his bid to become the director of anatomic pathology (The person who oversees surgical pathology, autopsy, cytopathology, cytogenetics, hematopathology, dermatopathology, molecular genetics - - in short the person who is in charge of everything that isn’t clinical pathology [blood bank, chemistry, coagulation, microbiology, etc]). I don’t think he was getting on to well with Dr. Wojcik, the chair, especially as she has stripped him of some of his duties, like quality assessment - - which were given to me. Dr. Hammadeh is a very nice person, always willing to go out of his way to help you, and a pretty good diagnostician. I must say that he is not a great administrator - - case in point, our duty schedules were issued a month at a time, and rarely were out in advance of the 29th or 30th of the previous month. The upshot of all of this is that when he leaves April 1, I have been appointed to serve as the interim director. I hope I can make twelve nights of service before I am sent out of town tarred and feathered.

Yesterday afternoon we drove out to Barbara and Roger’s to see the Giants surprising win over the up-to-this-point unbeaten Patriots for the Super Bowl title. Howard, Betsy, Andy, Gail, Eliza and Maddie, and the six Tuchlers joined us. It was great to see the four Tuchler boys making trouble, mine look like angels by comparison! There was an incredible amount of food, and many leftovers. We brought cheese grits, homemade dulce de leche ice cream with chocolate chips, a vegetable tray, dips, munchies, beer, and V-8 to make micheladas. Other food items included several different kinds of cheese, nuts, salami, coleslaw, salad, pate, pizza, chili, and cookies. I can honestly say my stomach hurt. We left in the middle of the third quarter because the Chicago weather was turning awful; we listened to the exciting fourth quarter on the radio on the way home. The drive took about 70 minutes compared to the normal 40; I did a lot of it at 35 mph.

Other activity over the weekend was a shopping trip to Costco, and swimming at the club with Jasper. He is getting pretty fast. He can beat me at 100 m breast, and probably 50 m back too. I think I still have the edge on him with crawl, and I am still far on top in butterfly, but this probably won’t last much longer. Lucas spent his weekend making a game about the American Revolution for social studies class and playing a new game-boy game sent by A. Vanessa for his birthday.

Last weekend was also pretty busy. Last Saturday we had a clean up the lab day. This is following the 5 S principles in Lean http://www.tpmonline.com/articles_on_total_productive_maintenance/leanmfg/5sphilosophy.htm . We filled over five dumpsters of material, cleaned up the labs, and started on our way to standardizing our work. We have also set up three groups to work on implementing Lean principles in accessioning (what we do when a specimen comes in), grossing (cutting up the specimens), and histology (cutting, staining, and distributing slides). We will be setting up teams on specimen filing and transcription in the future.

Sunday Jim, Michael and Andrew Tuchler joined Lucas, Jasper, and me on a trip to Alpine Valley http://www.alpinevalleyresort.com/index2.php . This is a ski resort about 90 miles from Hinsdale. They also have concerts there in the summer (I well remember county police ticketing and fining people on the spot while waiting on the highway for ingress to the park). The boys and I got up before six AM to arrive at the Tuchlers by seven. We drove north, with one small wrong turn to get to the park before nine. We rented equipment and bought lift tickets. I got Lucas and Jasper a one-hour semi-private lesson. Lucas needed a little refreshment, and I didn’t want to be the one to teach Jasper how to snowplow, turn, get on a chair lift etc. He learned all of that in one hour! They no longer have rope tows; the new way up the bunny slopes are ‘magic carpets’, which are basically heavy-duty people movers like you see in an airport. I picked up my two boys after their lesson, and we skied the ‘blue slopes’ (green in the west) until lunch. We ate with the Tuchlers, and then Lucas went off with them to the ‘black diamonds’ (blue) for the afternoon. I tried Jasper once on the hard slope, but it was too steep for him, so we spent the rest of the afternoon on the medium difficulty slopes. It was not a bad drive to do two or three times a season, if there is snow. And do we have snow this year! We had 8-12 inches dumped on us last week, with more to come. Ugh. Cindy is thinking about getting a snow blower. I’m sure that after she gets one, we will have dry winters for several years in a row - - it’s worth the investment!
Love, H.