First day of work

I had my first day of work today. My scrubs worked out OK. A few people asked where I got them and they were genuinely impressed when I told them about the scrubs at the thrift store. 


I saw a lot of really interesting patients. I mostly just followed the other techs and the doctors around, but I was able to do a few visual fields. Basically, I sit in a dark room with a stranger and make sure they don't look away from a little tiny light in a box as they try to see flashing lights in their peripheral vision. The test takes about 6 minutes per eye. Old people tend to fall asleep while taking the test and I have to be the one to say, "OK, be sure to keep your eyes nice and wide! Don't get sleepy! Only 4 more minutes to go! You're doing great! Don't look away! Stop looking around! Keep looking at the light in front of you! No, stop looking around!" And other things like that. 


I saw a really gross eye today. I try to describe it in as much gruesome (it took me 4 tries to spell that right) detail, so if you're squeamish, skip to the next paragraph. So this older guy came into our office a couple of weeks ago to get one of his eyes taken out. I'm not sure why that needed to happen, but it does happen sometimes if you have things like a super nasty infection or a bad cancer or things like that. Anyway, he came in today because his empty eye socket was completely filled with bloody ... stuff. I walked into his room and screamed in my mind. His eyelid over his eye socket was bulging forward and there was a huge bloody mass underneath it. There was a heavy trickle of blood seeping out of his eye, down on to his cheek. He had a tissue that he would use to keep the blood off his shirt. The craziest part was that he didn't seem to be in any sort of pain. Maybe he was on a lot of pain killers. I don't know. And then, the doctor came in to look at it and was touching it and pulling his eye lid back and things and said, "Oh yeah, this can happen sometimes," in the most casual voice in the world. I was contemplating drawing a picture for you in Paint, but that wouldn't be fair to the squeamish people who skipped this paragraph.


Anyway, because of the heat wave that we were experiencing (luckily it has passed), I was thinking about frying an egg on the sidewalk. I didn't actually do it, but I was curious how hot it needs to be to fry an egg. It turns out that it probably won't ever get hot enough. I found this article on the Library of Congress' website. It says that eggs require a temperature of 158° F to become solid. A hot sidewalk was only found to conduct as much as 145° F. However, it did say you would probably have better luck frying an egg on some blacktop or on the hood of a car. Schmecker lecker!