Week of June 4, 2001
Monday
Tuesday Wednesday
Thursday Friday
Saturday Sunday
Most Recent Update
You may have noticed that I was gone over the weekend. Actually we were not gone, just fencing. You know, fencing as in putting up a fence around our property. And we were doing it on very short notice precipitated by the actions of our neighbor. He is the one who the puppy bit sometime last week, or the week before. We don't know for sure as he has not talked to us about it which is the whole problem. Anyway, he evidently called Animal Control who paid us a visit on Thursday. The puppy was her normal affectionate self with the Animal Control person who did not feel she was a threat. However, we needed to get the fence up this weekend to keep her contained, as well as the other two dogs. So, I get home Friday night from the office about 8 after a very long day there and Delanae and I immediately set out for Home Depot in Portland to buy fencing. We found wire pasture fencing that was four feet tall and metal posts and bought three hundred feet worth with thirty posts. We then transported that home and went to bed so we could get up bright and early Saturday morning to begin the project.
Saturday morning dawned cloudy and wet and stayed that way with alternating showers. We worked for twelve hours that day, first clearing brush for the fence path then pounding posts into the ground and then, surprisingly, we had time to put up 250 feet of the fence before we quit Saturday night. We were all wet, sore, and short with each other by the time we finished Saturday night. All of us just collapsed into bed that night after washing some of the mud and dirt off.
Stacey and I managed to get out of bed Sunday morning and make it to church. While we were gone, Delanae and Stephen went to Ace Hardware here and got six more posts and fifty feet more fencing to finish the job. We finished the fence Sunday afternoon in time for everyone to get ready and go to Sunday night services. The completed fence has three gates in it with two of them being temporary until we can get some chain link fencing and gates to replace them. We will need about thirty feet of chain link fencing and two gates to permanently complete the project. The dogs seem to be handling it well with Suki tiring Dexter out by playing with him all day. Delanae and I are finding new bruises on our bodies each day from the work this weekend.
Now, the problem with our neighbor is not that he did not get bitten. I acknowledge that even though he has still not come to us and told us this like a person who wanted to be a good neighbor would have done. No, he never says a word to us even though we would have handled things the same way; he just reports us to Animal Control without bothering to see how we would react to Suki biting him. I have been bitten a couple of times by dogs while I was running and I always went up to the house where the dog lived and discussed it with their owner. They were always apologetic and made changes to see that it did not happen again. This person was too little of a person to do something similar. Our third hand report is that the bite was not very big and happened while he was using a weedeater which somehow frightened Suki and she bit him. We knew that Suki did not like lawnmowers and a tiller; attacking the wheels when she got a chance if the machine was running. She plays hard with Dexter and growls a lot with him but is very affectionate with us and kids who come into the yard and has not been aggressive with any other humans. Anyway, I feel we are owed an apology for the way he handled this situation if he wants to be friends with us. If not then it will be a tense relationship as their house is VERY close to our property line.
Anyway, back to medicine now. As I said earlier, Friday was a very long, very busy day. I ended up admitting one patient from the office with very low blood counts due to bleeding in her intestine somewhere and possibly a mass in her gall bladder area. I found out today that she had a large stomach ulcer which had been bleeding and the surgeons are looking to try and find out what is going on around the gallbladder. She is probably feeling much stronger now with more blood in her body and not losing it faster than she can make it.
Today was a little less hectic than Friday. I got finished with patients on time this afternoon for the first time in a long time. I saw about six less patients in the office than I did on Friday and most were not as complicated as Friday's were. I still have two patients in the hospital.
Today was a fairly strange day. The day started off with a Leadership Council meeting at 7 this morning. I went in very early to make rounds in the hospital before the meeting and I succeeded in getting finished seeing my two patients before the meeting. The meeting was fairly intense with a lot of discussion and some fairly tough decisions were reached but I think they were the correct decisions and will help the group in the long run.
After the Leadership Council meeting I had office hours until 11:30. During that time I only saw four patients as I had several no-shows. I don't know what the reason was but everyone picked this morning to not show and not call to tell us they were not coming. I did get some paperwork out of the way which I needed to do but it was weird to not be behind all morning. At 11:30 I had a continuing medical education seminar to go to which lasted two hours and included lunch. It dealt with seclusion and restraint, both behavioral and pharmacological or physical. Some interesting tidbits to be learned.
This afternoon things were more or less back to normal. I had an overbooked schedule and everyone showed up. I did get finished on time and then went to Stacey's school for her poster presentation of her project on a famous American they had studied. She picked Annie Sullivan who was Helen Keller's teacher and companion. She did her usual excellent job despite feeling sick and running a fever. Hopefully, it is only a cold and she will be much better in a couple of days. Right now, I do not think it is anything more.
Tomorrow I need to see some patients in the nursing home and have lunch with a nursing home administrator. I also have to do a physical for a patient so she can have urgent eye surgery next Monday. It sounds like my day off will be spent working so I will see my three hospital patients also in the morning; I just won't get up as early as I do on other days.
I was offered the position of medical director for one of the local nursing homes today. The nursing home wants to align itself closer with our group so they want to change medical directors and employ someone affiliated with our group. As medical director I would have to meet with them monthly and be on call for problems that the attending physician for the patient cannot handle plus help advise the nursing staff about problems that might arise. I was a medical director for a nursing home in Arkansas that was larger than this nursing home so I have the experience and it would not take much more time than I am already devoting to my patients there. If it sounds like I am going to take the position then you have guessed correctly.
Tomorrow I have more sports physicals to do. We will be at a different school early in the morning to do sports physicals. I will not stay as long as I did last time and will not be late to the office as a result. We should have more physicians there tomorrow morning which will make things go faster. There should also be less kids but we will see.
The sports physicals went well today. There were not as many kids to see so I actually got finished thirty minutes before I had planned to have to leave. It was also better organized by the school nurses who ran the kids through very quickly.
I did not get to discuss the medical director position with the nursing home administrator today. I will discuss it with her tomorrow. I did talk to the other members of my group who are already medical directors of nursing homes here and they all agreed that I should accept the position. I will talk to the administrator tomorrow.
Sorry for the short update tonight. We have been discussing a family trip for this summer which has taken a lot of time to decide on. Maybe more tomorrow night.
No update.
No update.
Two days disappeared again. I know I did something both days which is why I did no updates either day. First, Friday was a very long day at work. My number of patients seen during office hours all week had been down some but it really picked up again on Friday. So much so that I did not get home again until after 8 PM. I am trying to recall what stretched the day out so long but cannot recall many specifics at this point. Maybe more will come to me as I am writing this update.
Saturday was spent working outside on the yard. As you may recall, we fenced the yard last weekend. This weekend we cleaned it up more and replanted several rhododendron bushes along the fence to make the yard look nicer. We also cleaned out more of the fence row. What we are doing is slowly reclaiming the previously wild part of the property and making it into a yard. There is still much work to be done but we have made an amazing amount of progress in the last few weeks. By the time we stopped working last night around 7 we were all too tired to do anything but eat pizza and crash in the living room to watch a DVD. I did not have the energy to go downstairs and write an update last night either.
Today it has been raining off and on which is good for the transplanted bushes (and a couple of shrubs also). We rested today which meant I could run this afternoon before heading off to the evening worship service at our church. Tomorrow begins another week in the office so I had better get ready.
