Today's Anecdote

So, in defense of the wretchedly expensive hotel, that was an absurdly comfortable bed.

Anyhow, before I get back on the road, I'll leave you with this funny story (or at least I was amused) from Friday night's call:

One of the women I discharged had come in to have something called a SPECT scan, which is essentially a CT of your brain that helps us understand where the blood is flowing. To do this, they inject you with this little bit of radioactive tracer during some sort of event and then stick you in the CT scanner within a half hour. In her case, the goal was to inject the tracer while she was having a seizure, which would give us a snapshot of where the focus of abnormal blood flow - and thus, abnormal electrical activity - was while she was seizing. This is called an Ictal SPECT, because "ictal" means seizure. Okay. So we finally caught one (because, of course, to get the scan she had to have a seizure between the hours of 8am and 3:30pm), we scanned her, we sent her home. And her epileptologist recommended that she have another SPECT scan as an outpatient, when she wasn't having a seizure, or more precisely, between seizures, which is appropriately called an inter-ictal scan.

Okay.

So I put in her discharge orders, and ask the staff to make this appointment for her. And the unit secretary comes up to me about an hour later, and says, look, I've been on the phone with nuclear medicine trying to make this appointment for like 20 minutes now, and they can't find it in the computer to order it. So I spell it, we discuss the point of the scan, okay. And he comes back about ten minutes later and sits down next to me and shakes his head, and says, "I figured out the problem. They were looking for an inter-rectal SPECT scan."

Ouch.