Grow 'Em Big In These Here Parts

Saw a couple cases of head lice Thursday. The first one, it was alright. She had a couple of nits behind her ear and had been scratching for a couple of days. Rx for Ovide, tell her to wash her sheets or get outta the house for a couple of days, go camping or something. Nothing major....boom, Roasted!

The second.....I keep replaying the encounter in my head. Just imagine, big pregnant woman, with head lice the size of cockroaches. These critters weren't surviving on her scalp, they were evolving there. I swear to God I saw one using a bow and arrow, while another was jumping around a bonfire yelling, "LOOK WHAT I HAVE CREATED!" In all honesty I didn't even have to look for them, the lice were crawling everywhere. Turns out she has had this infestation (as have all her children and husband) for the past 18 months or so. She has been prescribed everything under the sun, but always insists it burns too much and stops using the treatment after an hour or two. I should have informed her that it wasn't the chemicals burning her that hurt, it was the evolving lice beginning to use plows on her scalp. We did the usual stuff, warning her about the risks to the baby, and that she can't use the lotions on the baby for almost two years. Talked some more about the importance of combing them out of everyones hair, etc, etc, blah, blah. The idea of cutting her hair off was brought up (did I mention she was Native American?), not gonna happen. She left without any treatment for it whatsoever and we quarantined the room till the Haz-Mat Team (janitors) could come with flamethrowers and declare the place clear.

What will probably happen: She'll get to Seattle to deliver the baby (she is high risk due to previous surgery complications), and they'll just hold her down and treat her before the C-Section or right after it.

How do you help someone who obviously (for the past 18 months) does not want your help? Why do they even come in anymore, apparently she wasn't getting the answer she wanted (this was the 6th visit for lice in the 18 months). But after the 2nd or 3rd visit, we ran out of solutions to give her. Goosefraabaah. Calm yourself JW. Goosefraabaah.

Forks, Dumpy Vampires, and Tourists

Been here in Forks, WA for two weeks now, and finally getting the hang of things around here. For the most part I like the town. First getting here, all anyone ever talks about is how much it rains (the amount of rain they get, different kinds if rain they get, the color of the rain, recipes for cooking rain, songs about rain, etc, ad nauseum). However, in the past two weeks we have had beautiful weather. It has rained a little, but you soon realize that's why everything here is so wonderfully green as well, and it's worth the trade. Yesterday I drove to Port Angeles (residents just call it PA). I parked in a lot right off of the ocean, but when I looked back inland, the snow covered mountain peaks were so close it felt as though you could just reach out and touch them. I sat there for a couple of minutes and just appreciated the thought of how close to the ocean these awesome peaks were.



For those of you not "in the know", Forks is also famous right now. It happens to be the setting for the profitable book-to-movie, "Twilight" series written by Stephanie Meyer. In the book, a young Bella Swan moves to Forks, where a family of vampires named Cullen and Native American werewolves inhabit the surrounding areas. The movie was released last year and since then the town has been a madhouse for tourists that come to see "Bella's Birthplace". Unfortunately for the tourists, Forks has absolutely nothing to do with the books...NOTHING. Apparently the author simply did a websearch for the city in America with the greatest rainfall/year and the name came up. Before writing the novel she had never lived here, never visited, nada, nothing. Even the movie has nothing to do with the city. There is one scene filmed in Forks that shows the "Welcome to Forks" sign, everything else was done in either Vancouver, WA or the Portland area.

However, driving through the city, you would never think that. The sign as you enter town now says, "Welcome to Forks-Home of Twilight!", all of the hotels have signs saying, "Vacancy, Vampires welcome!", and the local hospital has a parking space that says, "Reserved for Dr. Cullen" (I think the janitor guy actually parks there). Every business (and I mean EVERY), has some mention of the movie, from the Bella Burger at "Sully's Burger Joint", to the multiple movie posters in the windows of the local chinese restaurant. A special "Twilight Store" offers tours of the town, showing you such wonders as the high school (that wasn't even in the movie) that Bella would have attended (had she been a real person instead of fiction). My first day I went to the town's Visitor's Center (only place with WiFi) and sat outside at a table. A short black bus, painted with little diamond sparkles pulled to a stop just shy of the door. Out came (and I shit you not) about 6 middle aged, dumpy women, all holding copies of the book. The last to get off was wearing a black cape and had deep red lipstick painted on as well. I could just begin to imagine the fake teeth when she opened her mouth and....BOOYAH-fake teeth! This was the tour, and it runs twice daily, and people PAY FOR IT! I noticed the tour crowded around an older model red Ford pickup with a Washington license plate that said BELLA on it. It looked quite a bit like the truck from the movie (except the one in the movie is a Chevy), and there were about 20 people crowded around it taking pictures and pointing. When I went into the center to ask about other Wifi sites in town, I mentioned the discrepancy to the information chick. She said,

"Yeah, that trucks been sitting there for awhile, it was originally part of the logging exhibit. But so many people kept asking if it was 'Bella's Truck' I finally just went outside and put that license plate on it. Now we sell pictures of it to the tourists"

As I have mentioned before, I don't blame the people of Forks for all this. They need the boost in the local economy, and have to take advantage of what they can get, wherever it may come from. But the fact that busloads of tourists are here to take pictures of some random diner (because they thought it was from the movie), instead of taking a hike in the only temperate rainforest in the Northern Hemisphere just seems....fucking ridiculous.

Housing Search Part 2-"The Midnight Visitor"

So if you scroll down, you will see my previous story about a wonderful cabin in a swamp, *Just Right* toilet paper, and baby elephants. Here is where the saga continues.

After leaving Chigger's place, I headed to what I thought was my only other option for housing in Forks. An older widowed woman was renting out a double wide trailer about 20 minutes outside of town, but wanted almost $500/month for it. I decided after the clear bathroom fiasco that maybe this was a gift horse. When I arrived at her house (now with less than 36 hours till rotations started), I saw a small petting zoo. Chickens, goats, ducks, peacocks, a couple dogs, and a llama called this place home. Then I saw her...

She looked like Prof. Trelawney(?) from Harry Potter. Coke-bottle glasses with 4 inch diameter lenses, I knew why she was living in this cloudy rainforest. If those glasses ever caught and focused the sun, her head would burst like JiffyPop. She approached me like Noah, or maybe more like Ace Ventura when he calls his animals. We made small talk and walked to the trailer in question. I didn't see any fences other than the large outer one, and wondered if the yard was all one big cage. I also wondered why I wasn't stepping in more bird/goat/dog/llama shit. I soon found out why. Apparently, the front porch of the trailer was the designated litterbox for the farm. The railings around it were painted white...not with real paint unfortunately. Upon entering the trailer, I I wondered whether the previous owner had dogs, or if the dogs I had seen outside were the previous renters. My acute sense of smell was interrupted by a shrill, load cackle directly behind me. It was a male peacock. I asked what I thought was a very important question:
"Are they like chickens, they wake up early in the morning to crow or anything?"

"Oh no! They make that noise all day an night!" she replied with a self satisfied smile. I think she actually liked that about them.

I decided at that point that maybe this wasn't the place for me either. Perhaps that syringe floor apartment was still available? Probably a good decision too. From what I heard at the clinic, the last renters (male) complained that occasionally Miss Glasses would tip back a little too much Vicodin and come over for a visit...of the conjugal variety. It was kinda like that Garth Brooks song "That Summer", lonely widow woman and all that stuff. Except in the song I kinda felt the lady was good looking, y'know a cougar. Not a retired hippie wearing a moomoo literally covered in chickenshit. I guess when you think about it, the lady in the song coulda looked like that too, she was trying to run a farm. **My opinion of Garth Brooks just took a massive blow**

I declined that rental offer as well. Fortunately, at the last minute, my preceptor called and said he had found some housing I could use that was in town and really cheap. Crap, gotta sign off.

The "See-Through" Cabin

So.....yeah, it's been awhile. I been busy, bite me.

Just settling into my clinical year here in Forks, WA. Doing the rural thing and quite frankly, loving it. The town is **TWILIGHT** crazy, but then again this community needs the stimulus. A once famous logging town on the Olympic Peninsula, Forks' economy froze in the 70's (not sure if that's 1970's or 1870's). Overall it's really nice, walking down the street and recognizing all the patients that you saw the day before. Educating them for 20 minutes about the dangers of hyperglycemia and insulin resistance, then having them spot you at the only grocery store in town buying a 12-pack of pepsi and Haagen-Daz. Right now I am living with a nurse practioner in a "Mother-in-Law" apartment above her garage, but it wasn't always this way. Come along and enjoy the saga of how I fell into cowshit and came out smelling like a rose....

The 3 weeks preceding clinical year I was trying like hell to get housing in this small town of 3,000. Rental property is limited, and since the population hasn't changed since FDR got polio, it didn't look like anything new was gonna pop up. I finally got a return call from a gentleman by the lovely name of "Chigger" who was renting out a "Wonderfully rustic cabin in the Olympic National Forest" for the pittance of $350/month. He gave me instructions to his cabin and told me to go ahead and check it out, even though he would not be there (they really trust each other out here, it's cool). I drove out in the early morning, arriving at a very secluded log cabin, surrounded by meadows and a creek. All of this was enclosed by the Olympic Mountains on all sides. The added bonus was that it had phone service/Wi-fi/indoor plumbing/ and was only a 20 minute drive to town. I thought, "WOW! What a great deal, I can sit out on the porch surrounded by this beauty and write my SOAP notes, all the while being available for ER calls!"

The next morning I called Chigger, and told him I really liked the cabin. He told me to come out and meet him to talk about the details of the lease. When I got to his house, I told him I loved the cabin, with the cedar-shake roof, and rough cut barn wood in the bathrooms. His response was, "Bathroom-S?" Apparently, I had gotten the directions wrong and had taken a right instead of a left somewhere. I had inspected, rifled through, and used the bathroom in someone else's vacation cabin for over an hour like an overweight, middle-aged Goldilocks! Oh well, at least the toilet paper was *JUST RIGHT*
Then Chigger took me to the REAL cabin he had built. It was about 60 feet behind his new house.....in a swamp. It was just bigger than a postage stamp, and had been cobbled together from pastel boards from what could only be the Partridge Family's concert set. The bedroom fit a size double bed..and that's it. You had to jump from the foot up to the head because the walls on each side touched the bed. Another bonus: I was only allowed 2 megawatts of power each day. That's about enough to light a 100 watt bulb for 24 hours. I guess his main power source was a hydroelectric wheel in a nearby creek. Cool, but kinda a pain in the ass for a guy who spends all night on his computer and runs a fan in December. Also, no phone service, spotty Wi-Fi from Chigger's house, and all this for $350/month.
But the best part was the bathroom! To save on heating in the winter, Chigger had decided to build the ceiling AND ALL THE WALLS out of clear plastic used in greenhouses. Yep, not only would my neighbors get to see a daylight moon every morning, but the local ecosystem and wildlife would forever be influenced by a shy baby elephant in their midst.
As I left, I told Chigger I would have to think about it, knowing that unless my only other option was a crackhouse with a syringe laden floor, this baby elephant was taking his trunk on safari.

ER just called. The saga will continue. Keep on Scrubbin'!