Perspective...

Conversation the other day in the ED:
Me: (Reading GP referral letter) "Thank you for seeing this 35-year-old man with fever and myalgias (muscle aches) and headache." (To nurse) He doesn't look too sick to me...(Reading GP letter) ... I think he has (laughing uproariously) leptospirosis. (To nurse) If you would have asked me 25 things that followed the first sentence, "leptospirosis" would not have been one of them! HAHAHAHA!
Nurse: I swear, every meat-worker with a fever around here, their GP thinks they have leptospirosis. Sheesh!
Me: They do?
Nurse: Don't you have leptospirosis in Colorado?
Me: Leptospirosis? Uh...we haven't had, or, at least, not since I was in medical school...
Nurse: Oh! We do see a lot of it! Do you want me to draw the serology?
Me: But isn't that a send out? (Like, to the CDC?)
Nurse: Oh, no! It'll come back today!
***I guess when you live in a more tropical country, you get to practice a little tropical medicine, eh? After some quick reading on the matter, I found that we DO have lepto in the US...In Hawaii.





I was discussing with an RMO (Kiwi equivalent to an intern or second year resident) that he could still evaluate an elderly woman, who is deaf, and communicates by writing, even though the ambulance crew left her very essential reading glasses at the nursing home. More as a joke, I told him that since people lose higher tones first with age-related hearing loss, she'd understand his deeper man voice better than my female voice. He told us that was fine and good, but maybe his accent (which is a not very noticeable Indian accent) would confuse her...I said, "Oh, your accent isn't that bad!" To which one of the nurses replied, "Oh, like you don't have an accent, Molly!" And everyone thought that was hilarious. And I was like...that's funny...I'm not the one with the accent, YOU all are!