Friday, April 18, 2008

Cardarelli's sign

I am not a big reader of people's body language but I could not help but notice that during the last Democratic debate, that Hillary Clinton had a little Cardarelli's sign whenever she talked about the "sniper incident". I got to watch most of the debate while waiting for the OR. We were an urgent case but had been bumped by an emergency. While we waited we decided to medically examine the people on TV. John McCain has had what looks like a wide excision of a melanoma with parotidectomy and cervical rotation flap. (I wonder what depth his lesion was?) Anyway, one of the anesthesia docs had the best question? Why don't the presidential candidates have to have a physical and psychiatiric evaluation before running? The results could greatly affect the election or at least the choice of vice president. Can you imagine if the psycological evaluation of Hillary came back borderline personality trait with manic tendancies and that Obama was bipolar! What if McCain had a melanoma of 3mm depth and 85% occlusion of his LAD? If we could get a medical and psycological evaluation, could we also get an IQ test and the results of a personality inventory? Heck, lets test them like astronauts to find out who is the best, put them in high pressure situations to see if they crack, whine or fail! Make them do Marine boot camp to see who is the best military leader, put them on "The Apprentice" to see their economic skills. Only after they make it through these prereqs could they then run!

Disel fit

(the name of the hip prosthesis that is grabbed from the OR shelve) I broke the spining head of my "weed wacker" yesterday and set about trying to fix it. I actually love fixing things! (the internet has helped so much as it has the answers to many hosuehold fixes, you can go to a forum and type "diswasher won't completely drain" and there appears the solution!) Anyway, I got out the manual that came witht the weedwacker which is amazing in itself (I still had the thing!) I launched into the search of how to fix the thing and found 14 pages of warnings in 4 languages! No where in the thing does it say which way to wind the darn string once I epoxy glued the spinning head back together. The good thing was that in the English warnings at least it did not say "do not accidentally hit a garden rake with the weedwacker and then attempt to put it back together with duct dape and epoxy. I guess if it explodes I can always go to the new website (SueEasy)