Dear Everyone,
It seems that you all eventually successfully arrived back
home. The weather in Chicago was
unpleasant while you were gone, but much worse after you all came back! 9 inches of snow and the negative teen high
temperatures. Brrrr. Luckily, I am inside all day instead of
having a construction job. Not quite
that lucky, though - - I’m on call this weekend, and I was at the hospital
until after midnight on Friday, and after 2:30 last night. As usual, it was the ‘Gift of Hope’ (What is
the opposite of gift of hope? Theft of
despair?) transplant procurement team keeping me at the hospital. I don’t know why they always have to get the
organs in the middle of the night. As I
have told Cindy many times, they can have my junk only if they open me up
during normal working hours.
We did have a bit of fun while you were all away. The work load, not surprisingly, was pretty
light, and I was only working from 8:30 until 4:30. Even this was probably too long; there was
such a dearth of material, I probably could have left every day at 3. Our turn around time is going to be slow in
the coming months, because of forced early retirements in the laboratory. I think we lost about 20% of the histotech
work force, and these jobs are unfillable for several reasons. First, not many people are training for this
job any more. Laboratory technician
wages have been pretty flat over the last 20 years, and if you are smart enough
to work as a technician, you are also smart enough to train as nurse or a
therapist, where the money is better.
But also, ACL (the combined laboratory for Advocate) pays less than the
premium rate in Chicago, and probably has one of the highest throughput, high
stress jobs of hospital laboratories in Chicago. So, if you are smart enough to be a good
histotechnician, you are smart enough to get a job in another lab. Other issues at work are the continuing
problems with the voice recognition system, plus we will be starting to use an ‘upgraded’
pathology information system in the next few months, plus the move to the new
outpatient surgery center, plus the decreasing reimbursements and increasing
regulations of all medical labor. I’m
looking forward to retirement in a dozen years.
Back to fun. The
husband of one of my colleagues as a resident, Chris (Brown) Piller grew up in
Brookfield, and although they make their home in Charlotte, NC, he, Chris, and
their three kids usually come up here during Christmas to visit with his three
brothers, and his mom. Chris gave me a
call, and we got together with Jasper (the Piller kids were off doing stuff
with their cousins). We went out to
Chuck’s Southern Comfort Café’s second location. I may have written about visiting the one near
the hospital back in the summer of 2013.
Chuck opened up a second, larger restaurant in Darien, about 10 minutes
drive south from our house. We all had
barbeque, and sampled several brews from the extensive beer list. Chris, of
course, is a pathologist, while Ken is a plant geneticist. They met at Hopkins, where he was a post-doc
in a malaria lab, where they were trying to figure out how to splice malaria
RNA in hopes of generating a vaccine. He was there to learn about RNA splicing
techniques. When Chris was in St Louis
fulfilling her Air Force obligation, Ken had a job with Monsanto. Now Ken is a professor in North Carolina, and
he also has a spin-off company where they are able to put genes into soybeans
for protein production. So if you have
some complex protein that you need to get a lot of, he can engineer a soybean
plant to make it. He’s looking for
medical applications, such as pharmaceuticals.
We just watched the 49ers – Panthers playoff game, and I wasn’t sure who
I should root for - - Owen’s team, or Chris’s.
The Panthers seem to play a bit dirty (and stupid), so I guess I am glad
the 49ers won. Meanwhile, i don't want to talk about Jay Cutler's re-upping t with the Bears (later - - a match up between the Brady Patriots and Menning Broncos next week).
I rented some videos from the library to watch with Jasper
during the Mexico trip. We saw Seven
Psychopaths with Christopher Walken.
Sort of a weird movie. Might be
worth renting. I also rented Kagemusha
directed by Kirosawa. It was a real
boor; I don’t know why this movie was championed by George Lucas and Steven
Spielberg. I have read a few good things
lately: Fizz, a history of the
soda pop industry; Gulp, the book by Mary Roach about the digestive
tract. This book didn’t have a lot of
new information for me, but Roach’s satiric asides are hilarious. I told Joey that they should option the title
only, and use it as a springboard for a movie with Will Ferrell about insane
digestive researchers (like Woody Allen’s Everything you Wanted To Know
About Sex* *But Were Afraid To Ask).
I read a book of short stories by Russell Banks. These are well detailed and characterized
stories about (for the most part, there are some creepier stories about Miami) the
desperate lives of middle aged and retired, divorced white people who live in
upstate New York. I finally got a
history book out of the library that I ordered several months ago called “Global
Crisis: War Climate Change and Catastrophe in the 17th century” It’s pretty long, so I won’t be able to
report on it for a month or so.
Love, H.
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