Dear everyone,
I was at home alone this weekend. Cindy’s Dad, John Scalzo died last
weekend. He was 1 day shy of his 79th
birthday, April 1st. John
had been diagnosed with some kind of carcinoma about five months earlier, but
he never had a definite mass in any organ (what’s called a tumor of unknown
origin). He had a course of broad
spectrum chemotherapy, but that did not lead to a reduction in lymph node
swelling or symptoms. He opted for home
hospice care 6 weeks ago, and declined. John was a surveyor and highway
engineer for New York State, as well as a talented fix anything sort of person
who built the two houses Cindy grew up in.
The last time I saw him was this past October, at Joanne’s wedding - -
at least he was able to see all of his children reach adulthood.
Cindy went to the memorial service with Nicola and
Lucas. Jasper’s lab schedule and poor
flight timing made transportation to/from Albany and Pittsburgh difficult, and I
couldn’t make the memorial service, as I was on call this weekend, and it was
hard to change the date at short notice. I was pretty busy; I had over 80 cases
on Saturday (and about 10% required extra work up). In the afternoon I went to Jami Walloch’s to
work out and have dinner. I was just
getting in my car to leave, when my favorite people, the Gift of Hope called
and said they wanted to do an immediate liver biopsy. This was a case that he told me earlier would
not happen (if at all) until Sunday, or maybe even Monday. Apparently one of the transplant centers
wanted a biopsy done at his bedside (by an interventional radiologist) to determine
if it was even worth taking him to the OR for organ harvesting. The donor was about my height, but apparently
morbidly obese. His liver biopsy (which
I reviewed around 9:30 PM) was full of fat; they usually don’t use these for
transplantation. I told the Gift of Hope
coordinator that I refused to come back for another liver biopsy if they chose
to bring him to the OR (they have, on occasion, asked us to come in for a
second look on these cases that have bedside biopsies). It’s a total waste of resources for us to
look at a liver twice within 24 hours. So far they haven’t called me in.
Another frustration at work is the complete dismantling of
transcription services. You may recall
that several years ago we were forced to move to a voice recognition program. This (after two years of tweaking) works well
enough. It’s maybe 95% accurate. We had been steadfastly refusing to let them
take away our dependence on transcription for the frozen section area. It’s a high pressure area, with a lot of
other things going on (sometimes 3 multiple cases) and surgical procedures that
are immediately modified by our diagnoses.
I don’t want to have my attention split between a crappy computer system
and patient care. No such luck now. They decided they couldn’t spare even 30
minutes a day to accommodate us. It’s not
so amusing to hear the doublespeak of administrators everywhere (not just in
hospitals) about the importance of high quality products, when it is clear the
only thing important to them is keeping their job, which usually translates to
keeping costs down. I understand that
the mission can’t be completed without money, but there is such waste of
resources everywhere (some of which is inevitable), and when the people who are
on the ground are begging to keep some service alive, the people in charge can’t
seem to find their way to allocate the resources properly.
In other news, Lucas found out he has been accepted to the
University of Denver’s Geography program, so now he needs to choose between
that and UNC Greensboro. The latter is
giving him more money, but Denver is a happening place, and he could hang with
Jacob and Christine. He has never visited
the school, so he is flying there from Albany today. Nicola just got back from a trip to New
Mexico (since most of her work is on computer, she has the ‘luxury’ of being
able to travel and work at the same time).
We did not go to a Passover Seder this year, but I did buy some boxes of
matzo (not kosher for Passover, however).
The weather has been absolutely frightful, with snow and
temperatures in the daytime in the 30s.
More like December or February. I
can’t imagine playing baseball in these conditions (In fact, the Cubs home opener was cancelled today because of snow). I hope it starts to warm up soon.
Love, H
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