I used to toss sensitive documents in the hospital shredder bin. The bin is usually a locked cabinet that is emptied occasionally by a professional shredding company.

Several weeks ago, I noticed that a few of the hospital maintenance workers were digging around the “locked” bin. Since then, I’ve acquired a cheap-o-shredder for shredding purposes.

What I’ve discovered is that the standard 6-8 page vertical shredders are junk. You can’t aggressively shred anything thicker than 5 pages without jamming the grinder. In addition, the papers shreds could actually be reconstructed without too much difficulty if all the pieces were available.

I guess I have two alternatives:

1. Buy a nicer, cross cutting shredder with larger blade.
2. Burn my documents.

Or shred AND burn them. That would be entertaining and most effective.

misc humor, work

The NOAA has a tsunami tracker on their website. Interesting find…

misc

I saw a disproportionately large pigeon outside my window. It would take only 5 of those birds to span the entire width of the A/C unit. That is big.

misc misc

I’ve performed about ten pterygium excisions in the operating room so far, and the biggest challenge I’ve encountered is operating on the LEFT eye. I’d imagine that any experienced surgeon would scoff at this hurdle, but the patient’s nose seems to impede my suturing abilities significantly (I use my right hand for needling driving).  The suturing in pterygia operations involves the medial bulbar conjunctiva, which is adjacent to the nose.

On my first few cases, I used a traction suture on the cornea to help rotate the globe for access. To minimize trauma on the cornea, I now ask my assistant/attending to help rotate the globe with a muscle hook. This is impractical, since most surgeons operate solo in practice. To remedy this problem, I’ve come up with three solutions:

1. Practice more–the obvious solution, but not elegant.
2. Use my LEFT hand to drive the sutures when operating on the LEFT eye. Use my RIGHT hand to drive sutures when operating on the RIGHT eye. Switch hitters in baseball do it, right? While I am not completely ambidextrous, I’m sure that my triple-digit hours playing Quake III and other FPS’s might have helped my dexterity.
3. Operate only on RIGHT eyes. After all, there are already too many subspecializations in ophthalmology. Why not specialize on just one eye?

Which one is your favorite?

medicine humor, ophthalmology

I got a call from the emergency room several weeks ago regarding a consult for an “exploded egg” in the eye.

“Bullshit,” I initially thought. The ED frequently calls me about corneal abrasions and other minor trauma at obscene hours.

The photo on the left does not do justice to the severity of injury. Apparently, the patient had left a pot of boiling eggs on the burner, and exploded in her face. A shard of eggshell pierced the cornea through the stroma, nearly penetrating through Descemet’s membrane/endothelium.

The eggshell was removed in the operating room the next day. Unfortunately, I did not get to do the operation (but exciting nonetheless).

medicine ophthalmology