09:24 – Barbara gets her staples out today, which should help a lot. She’s frustrated that she’s not recovering faster, even though according to her nurse and physical therapist she’s doing extremely well.
We’re re-watching Everwood, which features the adorable Emily VanCamp. As Barbara commented last night, she hasn’t changed much at all between age 15 in the first season of Everwood and age 27 now in Reven8e. She’s a young adult woman now, and she was a young adult woman then. If someone had told me she was 21 instead of 15 then, I’d have believed it. If someone told me she was 21 instead of 27 now, I’d believe it.
In one of the episodes we watched last night, the whole group ended up snowed in at a party. One of the characters came down with appendicitis and there was no way to get him to the hospital. There were three doctors present and a former Army nurse, so they had the skills they needed but not the equipment. Which got me to thinking of what I’d do in a similar situation. As it turns out, we’d be in pretty good shape, at least relative to most people. Other than whole blood, we’d have everything we needed or the means to make it, from povidone iodine to antibiotics to sterile scalpels and hemostats, masks, saline/D5W, and so on. I’d be very nervous about anesthesia, but I do have both chloroform and diethyl ether on hand, as well as the means to produce oxygen. Not to mention an earlier edition of the book Emergency War Surgery, which despite the title covers everything from doing appendectomies through C-sections.