SALSA EMPIRE

Well, I have a great year in residency and all..... I am excited about what I have learned. I have gotten positive feedback. I am even finding my way into a place in family medicine which is unique. These are all great things. I love my job. I have good relationships with my patients. However, I am still considering a year off. Why you ask? An empire of salsa......

I have become somewhat reknown for my homemade salsa. It is very inexpensive and fresh, using mostly local ingredients. I make it in a blender. In fact, I think I wrote about it in an early blog entry.

If I can get some start up money I could get a pretty good business going. All I need is an industrial size blender, pounds and pounds of fresh jalapenos, onions, tomatillos, and extremely large cans of diced tomatoes. If anybody has an interest, let me know

FISH STORIES

I'm sorry to say that I have not blogged about this until now... but for the last month, I am a fisherman. Legal, licensed, Texas resident, fisherman. It's ironic. I have gone fishing about 5 times and the only time I caught something was before I had a license (which is technically illegal) but it was only catfish, which is the equivalent of stealing moldy bread that has been thrown in a dumpster.

Well, I have been in the ocean, drainage ditches, and lakes, and nothing biting. But, I have a friend who is a doctor with private land and private water that has never been fished, so there is some hope there.

Every one I meet has a fish story down here, it seems that everyone else can catch fish except for me. I will keep you all up to date......

HOWDY!!!

Just wanted to say "howdy" from Texas! This first picture she has a bit of a funny face, but that is okay.

We(Isabella and mommy) spent the entire day with some friends last week. It was really nice to be with a friend all day and the kids took naps together--it was nice! Oh, and this is Isabella's boyfriend, Noah. As you can see, they love to play together.

Interesting friday

Today was an interesting day, and it sums up my year well...... there have been a lot of great experiences at the hospital with a lot of variablity.

This morning I assisted my attending doctor during a vasectomy (male sterilization). I have never done one before, let alone never seen one done. It took about an hour, 10 mls of lidocaine and a few instruments, but without using a scalpel the procedure was done. It was mostly painless (it didn't hurt me a bit) and it was very cool to see. If I do more of them under supervision then I may be able to do them myself.

In the afternoon I was working in a dermatology clinic..... we see about 10 skin cancers a day. Today we had a patient in who has a history of melanoma and a new skin lesion that looks strikingly like melanoma. We excised it with 1 cm margins which left him with a cut that was 12 cm (4 in) long...... suprisingly, the doctor who was attending allowed me to cut out this giant piece of flesh on the patient's chest and then do most of the stitching. I was tremendously slow and a little bit embarrassed at my lack of skills, but it is done....

First Father's Day

Yesturday was a very nice day (i hope) for matt. We gave him his little presents in the morning before church and we had some breakfast together before he was off to play drums for church.
We (Isabella and I) told him how thankful we are that he is the daddy of our family and that he is a good and helpful daddy too. We love him very much. Here are some pictures from church. Matt and our friend Joe on their first Father's day.Isabella was a little sleepy in this picture with me. but it is a good one of me and it has been a while since we've seen one of those. :)

First Swim

Last week we got to go stay in a hotel for a night because matt was taking his boards. We decided to try Isabella in the pool for the first time. we got her suite on and got her raft thing blown up and headed out. It was incrediably windy and she didn't like it too much once we got in the pool--i think it was just too windy. we shall try again soon because it is getting so hot down here!!

Relaxin

Here are some recent pictures of Isabella--she is just so cute--everyone says so!!
The one were Rocco is sitting with her is the first video that Isabella has sat and watched--she loves her Baby Praise, Gran!! it looks like Rocco likes them too.

Irish Fest

The residency had a Irish Fest for the nurses last week. I went with Isabella to take a look and see what all the talk was about. The families weren't invited, but i didn't know that till we got there.
Anyways, Dr. Liebert (the program director) loves this kind of thing--it is sick how much energy this one man has. The residents served the nurses and everyone seemed to have a great time. I'm not lookin' too good, but atleast i have green on.

Emergency

I woke up this morning and put out the dog..... I was pleasantly surprised to see some new blossoms on my orange tree and my lime tree and then...... I realized that my young lime tree, my creme de la creme of the garden has one of it's large branches broken.

I thought about calling off of work to tend to the tree, but alas I could not. I rushed home to mend the tree, which entailed wrapping brown twine around the branch. I am hoping it will heal. To date, my bumper citrus crop for the last season has been 1 orange, which was partially eaten by a worm and 1 lime that was the size of ping pong ball. It is not looking so good for my future aspirations of farming, but we will see what next season brings.

Skit night

Tonight was our annual skit night at the residency - this involves each class and the faculty making skits where we make fun of each other.......

it was a lot of fun. It was also interesting because I got to learn how to edit video. We have a special computer program to do it at work. It was something I always wanted to learn how to do and I enjoyed it for the most part, except of course when the whole project got erased and I had to start over.

My friend Paul Miller has some experience editing video and from his experiences I don't think a video is any good unless it gets destroyed/erased/computer crash at least once..... so hopefully my experiences passes.


Another first experience for the week is that I had a patient with a subdural hematoma (bleed in the brain) and the Neurosurgeon showed me how to drain it at the bedside... he got me started and then left and said "your doing great" he came back just before I popped through the skull and got blood to come out, which is the goal of this procedure. It took about 7 minutes of rotating a very strong needle to get through the skull.

Unfortunately, the patient died today......now I am sure that nothing was my fault - he died from respiratory problems. But you can't just help but wonder and doubt yourself. At the very least God is confirming my call to family practice and reminding me that I would never make it as a neurosurgeon.