Bigger or Better: Life outside of Texas

Despite being the only redhead in my family, I've never had any doubts about my parentage. I don't even have to exercise much faith in the matter. Once, when my family came to my work to carol, one of my co-workers came up to me and said, "your dad cannot deny you;" point being that he couldn't claim I wasn't related to him because I LOOK like him. Same thing happens when friends of my mother see me. I visited my mother at her work last week, and the secretary of the Psychology department looked at the both of us and commented how similar we look. Admittedly hard to tell in this picture because the sunglasses are distracting Reason for this post: I flew up to Utah to visit my parents, living out of a carry-on for a week. It's a "make-it-do-or-do-without" attitude that I got from my mother. Fortunately, when the weather proved too cold for my wardrobe, I could borrow hers. My dad and my mom each drove me around in the UTV. My dad showed...

I don't know if people always appreciate the interesting situations that can happen in a hospital. I work to remedy that. I think I've mentioned that sometimes patients are really talkative. Unless there's a language barrier or a mechanical barrier (like a tracheostomy or laryngectomy, but sometimes they talk despite the hindrance), people just TALK. Stress relief, social interaction, mental stimulation....So the story. When I received my patient at shift change, he was sleeping, which can be deceiving on how the day is going to go. I walked in again later in the morning, and he was talking very animatedly with the Physician's Assistant about fish from Asia and GMOs. When the PA got out of the room, she told me that the surgery was difficult because he came into the operating room and he wouldn't stop talking, so the surgeons had to wait a while before intubating him. Oh, I thought, that's  the day I'm going to have. Yup. Next time I went in, I learned abou...