Wednesday, July 11, 2007

The two greatest moments in my career as a speech therapist thus far:

1. Watching one of my patients gather all the saliva in his mouth that he can, spit it on the carpet, and then SUCK IT BACK INTO HIS MOUTH!!

2. Imitating the sounds of a severely disabled little girl, forgetting that I have gum and accidently dropping it into HER mouth, while her mother watched it all. So embarassing.

Sometimes I wonder why I'm doing this, and then I get a day like yesterday, where I worked one hour out of a ten hour day and got payed to surf the web and cut off my split ends for the other nine. Excellent!

Sunday, July 1, 2007

You're going to put that where?!?!!


So Wednesday afternoon, I had an evaluation on this little baby with a completly crazy mom, who justified being 20 minutes late for her appointment because "she had just turned 21 the day before and was so completely wasted she couldn't drive home." Classy. Anyway, while I was trying to evaluate this baby and ignore mom's description of her drunken state the night before, I heard my phone vibrate in my desk about three or four times, but chose to ignore it. After crazy mom finally left, I got another phone call from my hubby:

Me: (no hello) I have patients all afternoon, I can't talk right now!
Hubby: Babe, I was taken in an ambulance to the emergency room cause I couldn't breath and my chest was hurting.
Me: What?!! Are you ok? What's wrong? WHY DIDN'T YOU CALL ME?!

Apparently, Josh had gone to the vending machine for his daily sugar fix and all of a sudden lost the ability to breath. His receptionist asked him what was wrong and then promptly called 911, no other questions asked. So after his joyride in the ambulance and a three hour wait in the emergency, we found out... he has a partially collapsed lung. And the treatment? Shoving a eight inch long rod into his chest with LOCAL anesthesia only to remove the escaped air--and they let me watch the whole thing. So disgusting, but at the same time, so fascinating I couldn't look away. Poor Josh-i don't know what was worse for him-the pain from them shoving it in or watching my face as they did it. Then they sent him home with this tube in his chest and a small box on the outside so his lung could reinflate and told him to come back in four days.



Today was day four, so we went back to the hospital to see if we could remove the chest tube. Unfortunately, his lung is still partially collapsed, so he gets to take another 3 days off work and sit at home doing nothing. Lucky.


But the good thing about it is, I felt so bad for him I decided to make him dinner for the first time ever! (Apparently some people don't consider cereal to be real cooking. Whatever!) And here it is: sweet and sour chicken. Josh said he liked it, but sometimes I wonder how much truth he tells me...