May contain coarse language

If you're (un)lucky enough to spend much time hanging around with doctors you'll undoubtedly hear them identify themselves or one of their colleagues as a shit magnet. Shit magnet doctors are the ones whose patients suffer sudden, unpredictable, bizarre, and potentially lethal complications, while the shit magnet doctor is on duty and typically after hours when little help or advice is available from more senior colleagues.

I don't believe in shit magnets.

You see, I don't believe in luck.  It's practically the only way I'm NOT like Han Solo.  Scoundrel? Check.  Corellian? Check. Sitting next to giant Wookiee? Check.  Believes in luck? Sad trombone. 

Luck, in the sense of a person consistently attracting bad luck or good luck, makes no sense to me, and long-time readers know that I am Captain Sensible.

So what's really going on?

For a long time I believed that these "shit magnets" were actually just whingers.  People who couldn't take the heat and yet didn't want to put down the hair dryer. Got two pages at once?  "I'm such a shit magnet." Your warfarinized patient fell down? "Shit magnet".  I do not concur. It's just run of the mill medicine and everyone else is dealing with it, so why can't you? This was consistent with my observation that shit magnets were often aesthenic control freak types, not that I'm a fan of such sweeping generalizations.

But recently I started to wonder.  I've seen a few self-proclaimed shit magnets at work, and also some self-pro-claimed non-shit magnets (who, from a physics point of view, are actually also shit magnets but with the opposite shit polarity so as to repel instead of attract the shit). And what I see is this - the same bad stuff happens to both.  But the shit magnets make a big effort to do everything properly and try to get things under control.  Whereas the non-shit magnets just let things slide. Their attitude is that if the problem isn't going to kill the patient before the end of their shift, it's not really their problem. This also was consistent with my previously mentioned observation that shit magnets were aesthenic control freak types, not that I'm a fan of such sweeping generalizations, also as previously mentioned.

So what's really going on is that the non-shit magnets are simply handballing their problems on the shit magnets who then deal with them properly.  At least that's my current theory.

Anybody got any other observations or ideas?

You're lucky I'm not a Jedi

People sometimes ask me, "PTR - how would my life be changed if some kind of super-villain stole all the liquid helium in the whole world?", to which I reply that I won't be drawn into speculating on hypothetical scenarios and that I would much prefer to talk about why people should keep their goddamn hands off my baby.

We were sitting having caffeinated beverages this morning in a nearby cafe when an adjacent table of oldies got up to leave.  Of course they have all been eyeing off the Hatchling the whole time so this is their opportunity to file past and ask us questions and give us unsolicited advice.  Which is, in general, fine.

Except this morning, one of the oldies thought she'd be funny and came and said, "What's in here, a baby?"  Sigh, yes, a baby.  Then she reached down and slapped the sleeping Hatching on the cheek with her big puffy ham-hock-esque mitt, looking frighteningly like Boris Yeltsin, and asked, "Is it a boy or a girl?"

Which is a question that I normally have no problem with.  In fact, I like it when people ask because it is, in a sense, acknowledgment of our refusal to sail with the prevailing winds and only dress the Hatchling in pink.  But this time I just wanted to fix the intruder with my best cold glare and say, "It's asleep."  Or perhaps just fire up my lightsabre and lop her whole arm off.

Did I?  No.  I'm too nice for my own good.  Plus I don't have a lightsabre.

Mind tricks

Sometimes you just happen to know a piece of seemingly arbitrary information, even though you might know not much else in the same field which is useful at all.  When that happens to me, as it did today, there's usually a strange reason that I remembered the fact.

There is a certain sci-fi movie which was popular back in the 70's called Star Wars.  In it there is a scene on the Death Star where Senator Leia Organa is being interrogated by Grand Moff Tarkin to reveal the location of the hidden rebel base.  He threatens to use the Death Star to destroy her home planet of Alderaan unless she complies.  She (falsely) reveals that the base is on the planet Dantooine, at which point Tarkin proceeds to order the destruction of Alderaan anyway in order to make an effective demonstration of the power of the Death Star.

Why is this relevant?  Because today I was able to pipe up in a tute and remind the presenting doctor, who was having a mind blank, that anaesthetic induced malignant hyperthermia should be treated with dantrolene.  Can you see where I'm going with this?  Dantooine = dantrolene.  Destruction of a planet using giant lasers = malignant hyperthermia.  I can still remember standing in the operating theatre when I first heard about dantrolene and that's exactly what I thought of.

Oh yes, my friends, that's how you scale the dizzy heights of success.