Updates

I've got lots of updates.

1. Heaven's hotties is coming along very nicely I expect to have a beta version soon.

2. Work has banned my site. This kind of puts a damper on my idea to make my blog more of an entertainment center for me at work. This could be very bad. I'm guessing, in a hospital that employs 5000 people my site wouldn't be banned soley based on my usage. Does this mean people at my work are also reading my blog? This could be a bad thing. I say alot of negative things about my job and my co-workers.

3. I'm thinking about switching doctors simply because his nurse is a fucking idiot. I took my son to the Dr. for his 1 year check-up. He was also feeling sick so it was pretty good timing. The Dr. prescribed a broad spectrum antibiotic and called it a day. As some of you know I just happen to work in a microbiology lab so I took advantage and ran several tests on him, on the health system's dime mind you. He came back positive for RSV. By it's self RSV is really no big deal most kids get it at some point. I still needed to call the nurse at my doctor's office for advice on whether or not I should continue to give him the antibiotic. Antibiotics don't do anything for viral infections. As a side note, Superbugs like MRSA are created when people don't finish all of their antibiotics, take them needlessly, or are given the wrong type of antibiotic. I'm not a proponent of giving someone antibiotics just for shits and giggles. Anyway, Back to the nurse. I gave her a ring a ding ding and informed her of my findings and she said she'd get back to me. The conversation we had when she called back two days later went a little like this

Nurse: Hey, this is J from the Dr.'s office. I did a little research and found out that RSV is a virus and the antibiotics probably won't help him very much, well at least that's what the pharmacist tells me.
(No fucking shit. I told you what RSV was, and aren't the worlds Respiratory Syncytial Virus a clue as to it being a virus.)

Me: Well, I knew that, that's why I was calling, should I continue giving him the Zithromax.

Nurse: Well, It might help in case he gets some other kind of infection
(like I said, it's never a good idea to give people antibiotics for no good reason, however, this did make sense for preventing ear infections while his immune system was hurting.)

Me: I guess that makes a little sense. I'll keep him on it.

I think what really pissed me off is that this nurse was unfamiliar with a pretty common pediatric virus. It also bothered me that she seemed proud of the fact that she figured out it was a virus.

My son ended up with a yeast infection because the antibiotics killed the normal flora (the good bacteria) in his body, and allowed yeast to grow uncontrolled.

Never do something because a "Medical professional" tells you it's the right thing. Do you're own research, there are a whole lot of fucking stupid nurses that will tell you to do stupid things like taking antibiotics for no reason, therefore giving you a yeast infection and bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics.

4. My hospital is all about "productivity" it's a rough formula that takes the number and complexity of tests and divides it by the number of hours worked in a particular department. Usually all we do is play with numbers to improve these rates, For instance, if Micro is looking like it may not reach the productivity goal I'll clock into a different department under an alternate rate of pay. So in reality these numbers don't mean anything except to the administration their raises are based on these numbers. Each department this last quarter was at at least 150% which is kind of ridiculous. It either means we're over-budgeting hours or we're working our balls off. Wanna guess which department didn't meet it's goal? Administration.

We also were recently named the number 3 health system in america by Verispan, Wanna know what my reward was? An email. My bosses? a cool 10 grand. wouldn't it make more sense to give that money to the people who earned it by having asinine productivity ratings? Oh well just more motivation to become management right?