Best part of Jeff's recovery

A little gift from a Diageo friend!

It started out as the perfect ride...

We started out for a sunset ride with Paula and her girls. The horses were all a bit antsy, as it was a cold day and a full moon, so the horses were not on their best behavior. Even in the shot below, you can see that both horses ears are back...not a good sign. And, the ride hadn't started yet.

As the ride progressed, one of Paula's daughters who is an expert rider had to turn back because her horse kept bucking her. On we went...

I then had to gallup ahead because my horse, Cloudy, was getting to be uncontrollable and I didn't want him to stir up Jeff's horse or to run with me in the woods. So, I took off and let Cloudy run to get the craziness out of his system. At this point, Jeff was with Paula and Cody just calmly walking their way back to the barn.

The next thing I knew I heard galloping behind me, as I was walking with Cloudy almost back at the barn. I figured it was Paula. I looked back and saw Jeff galloping up to me. His horse was not in a calm run, it was shaking its head and shaking its rear end as it ran. It got to my horse and they both started running, out of our control. I yelled to Jeff to pull on the reigns, stay low and hold on to the saddle horn...but just as he was passing me, his horse head butted mine and his horse lifted his rear end and threw Jeff off at a full gallup. I looked over and saw Jeff falling, and I couldn't stop the horses. I was no running away from Jeff with his horse (sans rider) and Cloudy. Now we were on blacktop...which is like being on an ice skating rink for horses with metal shoes. I knew I couldn't help Jeff, and I prayed I could stay on and not fall on the blacktop. At last the horses slowed to a trot. I jumped off Cloudy and saw Jeff not moving on the ground. I yelled to him but he was in shock and couldn't hear me. I pushed cloudy into the barn, and ran to Jeff just as Paula and Cody caught up with him.

Jeff was in shock and thought he was OK. He did decline the pumpkin pie and whiskey offer from Paula and got into my car...looking very grey. He was nauseous and could barely speak. Then he said his chest hurt even though he fell right on his back. He thought he was having a heart attack....so he agreed to go to the ER. I called all of our doc friends on our drive to the ER to let them tell the hospital Mr. VIP was on his way and I wanted immediate service. Usually Jeff likes to sneak in and not let them know who he is to the hospital, but that day he agreed to be treated like a board member.

Well, by now his chest was really hurting, and were both scared. The hospital took him in right away and ran all kinds of tests. Heart was fine! But, after 3 hours of tests, and NO pain pills they finally told us he had 4 broken vertebrae, 3 broken ribs, a ruptured adrenal gland (sits on your kidney) and a bruised lung.

He was in the ICU for two days, then to a regular room (well more like a corner suite at the Hyatt) for another 4 days. No permanent damage, and he'll just need time to heal.

He's already walking without a cane just 7 days later, and his rib and back pain is very minimal. This is a good thing, because along the way he's developed an allergy to something he's taking...so now we are managing the hives that are covering his body.

Been quite a week here at the Manor. We are just taking the recovery one day at a time.

And, Jeff and I have both been instructed to "get back on the horse" as part of the psychological recovery process. So, within two months, we will be back up there for a walk.

Birthday!!

WARNING: guest post by Paige's sister Katherine...

Today was my 25th Birthday!

Yesterday the festivities started with Sheldon making me an all out gourmet home cooked dinner. Growing up, my mom always made me my favorite meal for dinner on my birthday - mashed potatoes, something green like brocolli or zuchini, and meatloaf (I was SUCH a normal kid). So Sheldon decided to put a spin on the traditional b-day dinner for me. He started the meal with a golden beet salad with cumin raisin dressing, followed by bacon onion roasted brussel sprouts, homemade butter and mashed potatoes, and a bacon turkey-beef meatloaf. Everything was AMAZING (you can even ask Paige, since she took home about 10 lbs of leftovers). Then after dinner Sheldon surprised me with current favorite dessert - banana pudding from Magnolia of Sex and the City fame.

This morning, Sheldon took me on an adventure deep into the west side for Trapeze School (! - only in NYC - am I right?) We each got to go up about 5 times - this was my final attempt:



It was a ton of fun! We got to try a bunch of different moves and hang out with a few other groups of people, all of us were there for someone's birthday which made the atmosphere even more exciting and fun.

Then we met up with Paige for lunch at Sullivan St Bakery, where we all ate wayyyyyyy too much of really delish bread. I highly recommend the artichoke, yum! We decided to walk home since it was a beautiful day. Paige was planning to make a cake but we were so full that we decided we needed to wait a few hours. So we vegged out on the couch watching I Shouldn't Be Alive on Netflix (thanks Chuck!), drank a bottle of red wine (thanks Julie!) and played a game of Ticket To Ride (thanks Sheldon!) before our cake making. The final result was well worth the wait. That, and Paige shouldn't be allowed to use sprinkles:

Dad and Julie looked like Angelina and Bond last night

Julie: A post from my friend Rick on his blog.

I went to my very first skeet shooting and wine tasting party at Julie’s farm last week. You never know when your first skeet shooting and wine tasting party is also going to be your last. I wasn’t listening that closely when I was invited and heard something about shot this or shot that, and I thought it involved Alabama slammers, kamikazes, or maybe, sex-on-the-beach with an orgasm chaser. But this thing actually involved a fairly large arsenal of handguns, shotguns, rifles and of course a pink BB gun. It seemed like everybody in the place was packing. Mike had a .357, a police special .38 and what looked like a Kevlar vest just in case someone else had outgunned him. I thought I saw him pull a taser when I was reaching for the last chicken skewer.

I brought an appetizer, my shotgun and a couple of bandolero bullet belts. I was wearing a duster to affect a slightly menacing look, and also in case the place was dusty. It looked like we had barged in on a gun amnesty program. I thought I saw a hand grenade on the buffet table but it turned out to be a pineapple.

Lew and Rob ran the target shooting areas with safety in mind, and no one was killed or seriously hurt. Or even humorously hurt. I shouldn’t say no one, since I tripped up the stairs twice at the barn. Everyone had earplugs to use against the noise, and I noticed several people even wore them later on as I was talking to them, I’m not sure why.

Many guests had never fired a live weapon, and seeing so many women with guns was both exciting and unnerving. I myself had never shot a handgun, so I stepped up to the target area. I waved off the instruction, since I had watched the beginning of every James Bond movie at least 50 times. The target said to me, “So, Mr. Bond, we meet again- and this time, the cards are in MY favor. HA HA HA HA HA!” I wryly responded, “You had better check your hand once more, my friend… perhaps you hadn’t counted on THIS!” I spread my feet, lifted my sidearm using both hands, and emptied the clip. The target did not go down, so I threw the gun at it, momentarily confusing James Bond with Superman. Lew pried the gun out of my hand, saying something about having to re-sod the lawn now.

I fared a little better with the shotgun, since I have shot skeet before. Luckily, most of the clay pigeons broke coming out of the thrower, and if I shot quickly and winked I could create the illusion of success. Most of the birds fell harmlessly into the lake, and when I say harmlessly, I’m not counting all the fish who were beaned in the head. I asked Julie if she could put some of the fish into a barrel so we could shoot them and see if it was as easy as people say.

The estate was spectacular and beautiful. The grounds so big they could only be navigated by Segways with knobby tires. If you have never ridden a Segway, it’s quite a treat: you simply get on, and after you chase it about 20 feet trying to get on, you just lean in one direction or the other to turn or go forward or backward. The property slopes to the west, so several Republicans fell off the thing trying to turn left.

The wine tasting was also lovely, except for a tense moment when somebody popped a champagne cork and everybody hit the deck, still a little gun-shy. The venison was quite tasty, and it turned out that the boys had killed it themselves. No one would actually admit that they ran into it with their car, but I did see an antler-sized dent in the fender. There was a beautiful duck on the table that the menfolk had shot and stuffed. They said it was a hooded merganser, but I couldn’t tell one way or the other with the hood on.

Everyone brought an appetizer, and my wife made a delicious chicken and ginger offering. I kind of wished we had shot the chicken ourselves, but it was already dead so it seemed pointless. I did however empty some lead into the ginger.

I hope Julie doesn’t mind, but on my way to the party I took the liberty of stopping by the neighbor’s house to feign asking directions, and I let them know our two families were having a nasty blood feud and we were still pretty pissed off that the North won the war. When the gunfire started I pictured them shivering under the bed pretending to be dead.


Incidentally, the Puckle gun was unveiled in 1718 by James Puckle. Some say that “necessity is the mother of invention,” but it’s possible that having a name like Puckle is, instead. It fired square bullets, an upgrade over his previous design, which fired bullets in the shape of a parallelogram. Samuel Colt was the first to apply modern machining and mass production to the manufacture of firearms, his patent for the Colt revolver issued in 1836. Muzzle-loaders went out with the Crimean War in 1856, with the exception of my dog.

Methodist

On Tuesday I started my fourth clinical rotation at New York Methodist Hospital. (recap: one, two, three) I will be spending my first month here doing a general rotation (meaning that I am in an operating room doing general-type cases, as opposed to a specialty, like trauma). The second month I am going to be doing OB! I am really excited for this rotation, the only downside is this:

Methodist (point B on the map) is in Brooklyn, about an hour away from my apartment (point A on the map) by subway. This isn't ideal but it is doable, especially if I only need to take one train (the first option) but for the next three weeks the 3 train is not running due to construction (this is the busiest time for construction on the subway because the summer tourists have left and the holiday Thanksgiving/Christmas tourists have yet to arrive) which means I need to take three separate trains to get there. The unfortunate part about that is that if any of the trains is late, I will miss my connection... and when you are riding the subway that early in the morning the trains only come every 20 minutes or so. To give myself a cushion, I have been trying to catch the trains in that third option (the one that gets me there at 5:34) but I have yet to make them all so I keep ending up getting there around 6... so by the time I get in and get changed, it is 6:15 and I have already been up for two hours before the day has really even begun! Enough whining. I have a cool video for you from the OR yesterday. I spent the day giving anesthesia for robotic procedures - the way the robot works is that the surgeon sits at a console (picture a video game in an arcade) where she controls the instruments connected to the ends of the robot's arms. The instruments are inserted into the patient's belly through tiny little incisions, the idea being that this type of surgery is much less invasive than having your whole belly cut open. In theory this will make for faster recovery times for patients (since they have less healing to do) which will translate to lower costs to the hospital (because you won't have to stay as long). Since the robotic procedures are still so new, the surgeons are still getting used to using the robots. This means that they are much slower at doing the surgery (than they would be if they just cut the belly open) and, since OR time is so expensive, that is negating any money the hospital saves by getting the patient home sooner. First take a look at this picture so you can get a lay of the land:

You can see my anesthesia machine on the right, then there is the patient's head right in the middle (I am at the head of the bed, so picture the patient laying with his feet away from me, towards the back wall), there is the drape separating my area from the surgical field and then you can see the robot arms - they kind of look like big spider legs - covered in plastic to keep them sterile. I took the video looking over that drape towards the patient's belly. You may notice that his belly is blown up like a balloon, the surgeon injects gas into the belly to open up the space so that she can see what she is doing. The sound you hear is the sound the cutting instrument makes. One of the robot arms is holding a camera, I pan up at the end of the video so you can see the camera feed, this is what the surgeon is looking at in the console (only in much higher definition, and in 3D). They cut using electrocautery (heat conducted by electric current) so that is why you see bubbling/smoke when the noise is happening.

Halloween Snow Storm

You may recall that Chuck's birthday is at the end of October so Happy 27th Birthday Chuck! I came up to CT for a weekend of pumpkin-flavored beer drinking between clinical rotations (I finished at STC on a Friday and started my next rotation the following Tuesday). Chuck brought some pumpkins home from work and we had an evening of carving while watching Hocus Pocus (on my laptop which is set up in front of the TV because Hocus Pocus wasn't available for streaming on Netflix but I insisted that we watch it). Here is the scene:

Now, while I am a fan of pumpkin carving I don't go all out. I am happy with a simple face. Chuck decided that, if we were going to be carving pumpkins as 27 year olds, we could set the bar a bit higher - so we went to work:

Chuck settled on a Boston College mascot theme (they are the BC Eagles):

I went with a ShopRite theme in the hopes that Chuck's parents would put it at their front door for all of the trick-or-treaters to see:

Pretty good eh? I'm sure my plan for pumpkin displaying would have worked out but then this happened:      

Alas, since it is still supposed to be fall all of the trees still have leaves on them so when the snow storm hit the trees couldn't take the weight that built up on their branches so they started toppling left and right. Here is a picture of Chuck and his dad on his dad's street:

They are standing at the top of his dad's street (the plow couldn't get through during the night for obvious reasons). Aside from it being sad/scary to have trees falling down all over town, it was crippling because they were falling on phone and power lines. The storm happened Saturday evening/night. I was supposed to take a train back to the city on Sunday (I had class and a test on Monday morning) but all of Amtrak was shut down in the state of Connecticut because they were without power. Instead, I went to ShopRite with Chuck (we picked his dad up on our way, that is when I took the picture!) where we tried to salvage their perishable goods by moving them into refridgerated trucks. It was quite a disaster. As I write this (a week later) one of their stores still doesn't have power so it is running off of a giant generator and Chucks apartment (along with 75% of homes in Connecticut) still doesn't have electricity - remind me again why we left California?