Monday 28 November 2016

Absolutely positively pretty sure

I'm in a fairly comfortable position in trauma surgery, in that I don't always have to be 1) certain or 2) correct.  That might not make a whole lot of sense on the surface, so let me explain.
  • Orthopaedic surgeons have to be 100% positive they are replacing the right, er, I mean the correct hip
  • Urologists have to be 100% positive they are removing the correct (ahem) testicle
  • Surgical oncologists have to be 100% positive they are removing the mass from the correct breast 
I, on the other hand, only need to be pretty sure that there is something catastrophically wrong with someone's chest or abdomen before I slash him open.  If I wait until I'm 100% positive, I could risk serious consequences, like people dying and stuff.  Not only do I not require conclusive evidence, I could even be wrong and the patient may not need an operation at all.  But a trauma surgeon will never be criticised for performing an unnecessary laparotomy or thoracotomy.

Ok, that's not entirely true and I'm exaggerating slightly.  But only slightly.  I should clarify that as long as the surgery is indicated, the surgeon will never be considered wrong, even if there's nothing actually wrong.  After all I can't justify cutting open someone's abdomen if he's been shot in the foot, for example.  However, a patient who arrives in my trauma bay in profound shock and actively dying without an obvious source (ie blood pouring out of his neck) may be justifiably taken for immediate chest and/or abdominal surgery if there is a strong enough suspicion that there is something in one of those cavities that is causing imminent death.

Of course I need to do everything I can to ensure that the surgery is actually indicated, but sometimes there isn't time to verify.  And even if I'm wrong and the problem was elsewhere (sepsis unrelated to the car accident, for example), that is a risk I have to take in order to potentially save his life.  I don't have be completely 100% sure, I don't have to be right, I just have to be pretty damned sure.

I hope that makes sense now.

That being said, I love being sure, I hate being wrong, and I love being right.  And that was most definitely 100% the case with Trent (not his real name™).

I was in the middle of reading a scintillating article on the treatment of pancreatic cancer (ZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzZZZZZZZZ) when my pager alerted me to a level 1 stabbing victim arriving in 10 minutes.  I looked at my watch and nearly gasped - it was just after 2 PM.  Getting a stabbing victim in the middle of the day is a bit of a luxury.  Operating in the middle of the day rather than the dead of night?  It's almost like a vacation!  I casually tossed (read: aggressively threw) the fascinating (boring as hell) journal aside and ran down to the trauma bay, excited to get a serious trauma while the sun was shining.  Five minutes later I met Trent, though I can't really say that Trent met me, because he was nearly unconscious.  He was moaning and could barely open his eyes.

"Hey Doc, this is Trent.  He's young, maybe 25 or so, single stab wound to the chest."

They had already disrobed him, and despite the cool weather, Trent was sweating profusely.  UH OH, my Inner Pessimist groaned.  A quick survey of both his front and back (never forget to look at the back!) informed me that the medics hit the nail right on the head - one solitary stab wound just to the right of the sternum (breast bone).  I whipped out my handy dandy, um, heart-listening doohicky thingy . . . you know, that thing that goes in your ears that surgeons rarely use . . . whatever.  Anyway, his heart was beating, but for such a young guy it didn't sound very loud.  His breath sounds were normal and equal on both sides, so I doubted he had a serious lung injury.  His heart, on the other hand . . .

A stab wound to this location can go pretty much anywhere and hit pretty much anything - right chest, left chest, abdomen, mediastinum (which contains the heart) - but I strongly suspected my Inner Pessimist (who was screaming "IT GOT HIS HEART, DUMBASS!  IT GOT HIS HEART!!" repeatedly) was right.  I just wanted to be sure before I slashed open his chest.  Or at least pretty damned sure.

While the radiology techs shot a chest X-ray (which was normal, no sign of a pneumothorax), I ran over to get my ultrasound machine.  A sonogram in trauma takes less than a minute and is designed to do one thing: detect fluid where it does not belong, either in the chest or in the abdomen.  I listened to my Inner Pessimist (who was still screaming something about the heart directly in my ear) and put the probe on his epigastrium just under his breastbone first, aiming up at his heart.  Despite doing trauma for {redacted} years, I have still seen very few positive trans-thoracic echocardiagrams, because these folks usually die before reaching me.  This study looked . . . hm, weirdly positive, I thought.  It looked like there was fluid within the pericardium, the sac that surrounds the heart.  In an elderly person with congestive heart failure this could be considered normal, but in a normal healthy young guy with a stab wound to the chest, it always means a hole in the heart.  Well, almost always.  Pretty much.  But having seen so few positive studies, I still wasn't 100% sure.

Knowing I didn't have to be 100% sure (but still wanting to be), I completed the sonogram of his abdomen (which took about 45 seconds) and saw no fluid around his liver, kidneys, spleen, or pelvis.  ("THE HEART!  THE HEART!").  Just to be the tiniest bit surer I went back up to his chest, and again there was that thin line of black (fluid) around his heart where only white (tissue) should be.

I was now absolutely positively at least 95% pretty sure that the knife had pierced at least the pericardium, if not the heart itself.  That was more than enough for me and Trent.

About 15 minutes later we were in the operating theatre, and on the way I explained to him that I was going to open his chest and repair his heart.  I am unsure if he heard most of what I said, and I'm even less sure that he understood any of it.  As he was put under anaesthesia, I did the one thing I had been wanting to do since he arrived: I put my finger into the stab wound.  Gently.  For me this is the most accurate method of demonstrating that a knife (or gunshot) wound penetrates into some cavity where it should not have been.  I felt my finger slide between two of his ribs (one of which had been fractured by the knife), and the tip of my finger nestled right onto something that was beating, moving rhythmically at exactly the same pace as the monitor was beeping.

My "95% sure" was now 100%.

Five minutes later his sternum was split in half.  I opened his pericardium, and there to greet me was a 2 cm laceration in his right ventricle.

In case you hadn't guessed, that's considered a Very Bad Thing.

The key in this situation is to stop the bleeding.  Initially, this is very easy to do - I stuck my finger over the wound to plug it.  This allowed the anaesthesiologist time to catch up with resuscitating him, and it allowed the nurses time to get the supplies I needed to fix it definitively.  It only took about 15 minutes to suture the laceration, 5 minutes to look around the rest of the chest to confirm that there weren't any other injuries (there weren't), and about 30 minutes to close.  In all, it took about 75 minutes from the time he hit the trauma bay door until he was in the recovery room.

And only four days for him to walk out of the hospital.

Over those four days, unlike most of my patients Trent was extremely appreciative of our work to save his life.  He made every effort to say "Thank you", or "I really appreciate you", at every opportunity.  Trent even made it clear that he needed to shake my hand whenever I left the room.  I always make a conscious effort to treat all my patients equally no matter what, so while his appreciation did make taking care of him that much easier, I am absolutely positive that I did not treat him any differently than anyone else.

Well, pretty sure.

Monday 21 November 2016

Doctors make the worst patients

We apologise for the recent foray into politics and now return you to your regularly scheduled stupid stories.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, everyone knows the stereotype that doctors make the worst patients.  What's funny is that I thoroughly enjoy perpetuating the stereotype because it's absolutely goddamned true.  We do make the worst patients, and I freely admit it.  I don't know if it's because we think we're indestructible or if we just enjoy living in denial that anything could actually be wrong with us.  But whatever the reason, we suck.

I will also freely admit that I personally am a terrible patient.  Fortunately I do not have any chronic medical conditions, so I don't have any prescription medication to accidentally ignore and forget to take on purpose.  But I do tend to ignore my own health, instead focusing on the health and wellbeing of others.

But getting back to people who aren't me, DadBastard is a perfect example of a doctor not taking care of himself.  He willfully ignored MomBastard's advice (badgering) to get a screening colonoscopy at age 50 like his GP recommended ("I'm too busy" was his usual excuse).  He ignored my advice (annoying constant nagging) to do it at 55.  Finally at 60 he did it . . . and it was stone cold normal.  His colon was squeaky clean.  Fortunately he resisted rubbing that fact that in our faces.  Much.

Dr. Natalie (not her real name™)  is another perfect example.

Dr. Natalie is an ophthalmologist friend of mine whom I have known for nearly a decade.  She is very friendly, very smart, and very good at her job.  I hadn't seen her in quite some time when I ran into her recently.  As I gave her a hug I noticed the cast on her right wrist.  The trauma surgeon in me was immediately curious about what happened.

Apparently she had been running early one morning before the sun was up, and it wasn't bright enough for her to see the branch on the path.  She stumbled over it, landing on her outstretched right hand.  Completely plussed (what the hell is the opposite of "nonplussed" anyway?), she finished her 5 km run, and when she got home she noticed her hand turning purple and swelling impressively.  While she suspected it was fractured, she went to work anyway, where she had a full schedule of patients to see.  As the day went on, the swelling and pain got worse, so she suspected it was broken.  Unfortunately she had a flight to catch the next morning, so she thought, "Meh, I'll just wait until I get home in 3 days to get it X-rayed".

Since she had a cast on her right hand, you can obviously guess the outcome.

What I haven't yet mentioned is the fact that I "ran into" Dr. Natalie in her office on a Saturday morning, because I had called her and asked her to see me emergently.  Because my right eye was fucking killing me. 

For, uh, the past week. 

Yes indeed, the doctor in this story who is the worst patient is not DadBastard, not Dr. Natalie, but I.  Ha!  Gotcha!  Now that is a Usual Suspects-level plot twist!

Not really. 

My eye had been hurting for about 7 days.  It had started the morning after I had done some major sanding on a project I'm currently building, and it hadn't gotten any better.  It felt like something was in there, and flushing it and rubbing my eye hadn't helped either.  It wasn't hurting to the point of preventing me from working or sleeping, but it was definitely very irritating, nearly as irritating as antivaxxers (I had to squeeze that in here somehow).

What finally made me seek care was when I woke up Friday morning and the vision in my right eye was blurry.  SHITSHITSHITSHIT.  I don't know much about the eye, but I do know that is bad.

I finally broke down and consulted someone.  No, not Dr. Natalie, at least not at first.  Against my better judgment, I saw an emergency physician.  Now before you go and start accusing me of various things, I didn't want to, I had to.  It was also rather convenient, since I was on trauma call and in the emergency department/A&E anyway.  I found a doc I know and trust (relatively speaking) and told him of the foreign body sensation I was having in that eye, and he very nicely agreed to take a look.  He put some fluorescein dye in my eye, looked with his special scope, and saw . . . absolutely nothing.  No corneal abrasion, no foreign bodies, nothing.

I breathed a sigh of relief and then immediately realised how stupid that relief was.  If it wasn't a foreign body or corneal abrasion, what the fuck was it?  Retinal detachment?  Macular degeneration?  Some disgusting parasite?  Cancer of the eyeball?  Dry eye?

Ok, I admit didn't actually think of dry eye, because my Inner Pessimist was only allowing me to think of either life- or career-threatening maladies at that point.

The next morning my vision was just slightly worse in that eye, and the foreign body sensation was also a bit worse.  E-FUCKING-NOUGH.  I had had it.  I did the last thing I wanted to do - I called a colleague for a favour on a Saturday morning.  After I told Dr. Natalie of my symptoms (including the blurry vision), she very graciously and without any hesitation whatsoever told me to meet her at her office in an hour.

After she took a detailed history, she put the fluorescein dye in my eye again.  It took her exactly 1.272 seconds (I timed it) to do a rather impressive double take.

"Oh my god, how long has it been hurting?" she gasped.

A week, I told her.

"Doc (not your real name™), you have, let's see, one, two, three . . . SIX foreign bodies in there!  How the hell have you been working like this, and why the hell didn't you call me sooner?  Most people are crying and calling for emergency appointments with ONE foreign body, and you've been living with SIX of them for a WEEK??"

I let out a small, sheepish sigh of relief combined with a slight pang of guilt and a rather large pang of stupidity.

She very carefully removed all six shards of sawdust (yes, sawdust), and after completing a full eye exam she told me that my cup-to-disc ratio was perfect (HUZZAH!) and that there was no sign of infection (HUZZAH!).  She expected the pain to last for another day and my vision to return to normal a few days after that.

And there was the real sigh of relief.

It took one glorious night of 8 glorious hours of sleep for the pain to improve dramatically.  Four days after that my vision returned to normal, or rather whatever I had previously considered normal. 

I often say that any day you learn something is not a wasted day, and I definitely learned something that day.  Yes sir, this little episode taught me a very valuable lesson: wear goggles while sanding

What, you thought I was going to say "Be a good patient and see a doctor"?  Ha ha!  No way!

I'm indestructible. 

Sunday 13 November 2016

Real name

FAIR WARNING: THIS POST MAY ANGER A LOT OF PEOPLE.  I UNDERSTAND THIS FACT AND DECIDED TO WRITE AND PUBLISH IT ANYWAY.  MAY GOD HAVE MERCY ON MY SOUL ETC ETC.

I'm going to do something a bit different on this post.  Actually, two somethings different.  First, I'm going to use a patient's real name, and without her consent.  Before anyone asks, yes I know what I'm doing, and no I've not gone crazy.  The second different thing will be that I'll be veering away from medicine, something I've been loathe to do here.

The very keen reader will notice that the previous paragraph doesn't make sense.  But like everything I write, it will all (I hope) make sense by the end.

The patient I will discuss is sick.  Very sick.  Very VERY VERY VERY sick.  She's been sick for a long time, and recently she's gotten even sicker.  I have been following her for quite some time, though I am not smart enough to fix her.  I'm not sure anyone is.

Her name is the United States of America (her real name™).

I'm sure most of you saw that coming the proverbial mile away.

That's right people, I'm going to talk politics on this blog for only the second time (I think).  Though I follow international politics (looking at you, Brexit), I tend to avoid talking about it like naturopaths avoid evidence.  If you really want to lose a friend, bring up politics.  Pick any topic you like.  Chances are you'll be A) disagreed with, B) quickly, and C) vehemently.  No one can seem to agree on anything.

Except Donald Trump.

Everyone seems to agree that he is a misogynistic, xenophobic, homophobic, racist asshole.  Yet over 60,000,000 people voted for him.  Let that sink in for a moment - over sixty million people voted for the Apprentice guy, a man who has never held public office, whose biggest claim to fame is being a "successful" businessman (whose success is measured by not paying taxes because he lost nearly a billion dollars) and reality television star, and who seems to anger every ethnic minority (and many ethnic majorities) by spewing bile and bilge at every turn.

And he was just voted president of the United States of America.

Keep in mind that I have no dog in this fight.  This is not my circus, and these are not my monkeys.  I am an outsider looking in, but I can faithfully and without reservation say that if this were my circus and if they were my monkeys, I would not have voted for Donald Trump.  Not in a million years.  It has little to do with the fact that Trump inexplicably still believes that vaccines cause autism (I'm sure you knew that was coming) or that vice president-elect Mike Pence denies evolution and believes god created the universe in exactly six days, but more with the fact that Donald Trump is a misogynistic, xenophobic, homophobic, racist asshole (where have we heard that before).

But he won anyway.  His win without a doubt reveals one thing with incredible clarity: the United States is dreadfully ill.  The fact that such a man could be elected its leader stunned me, but it didn't surprise me (I'll explain).  Anyone who didn't see this coming doesn't follow American politics or its international effects.

Racism and hate in the United States was supposed to be solved by its first black president.  Barack Obama was supposed to fix it with hope and change.  Racism was to be relegated to history books.  Not only has that not happened, but the racial divide has actually deepened (from my perspective).  This has been highlighted by the numerous protests, change.org petitions, "NOT MY PRESIDENT" chants, tweets, blog posts, and newspaper articles about how horrible Trump is, how horrible his presidency will be, how he will be impeached, how they wish he will be a terrible president, and how Hillary Clinton should still be elected despite losing.  THAT IS NOT HELPING.

Over three million people have signed this petition (EDIT: now nearly 4 million) calling on the Electoral College to elect Clinton rather than Trump because Clinton received more popular votes.  While it may seem like that should seem to be a win, the American electoral process is not designed that way, and it has not been set up since its inception.  Just like George W. Bush in 2000 and 3 other US elections, Trump received more electoral votes, and he is therefore the winner.

Any argument about the Electoral College being obsolete and needing to be overhauled or abolished is irrelevant at this point after the fact.  That would be akin to demanding at the end of a football match that the game be extended by 10 extra minutes because your team hasn't scored yet.  You may not change the rules after the fact.  THAT IS NOT HELPING.

This election is and always was about a broken country.  The people wanted a change, and they got it, most probably more than they bargained for.  But the chanting, marching, complaining, whining, and backlash is not helping.  The anti-Trumpers who are protesting are feeding into exactly the same division that allowed Trump to be elected in the first place.  They are driving a wedge between them and the pro-Trump crowd, widening the rift, and IT IS NOT HELPING.

And this isn't just about black versus white.  It isn't just about men versus women.  It isn't just about poor versus rich.  It is fully half the country versus the other half.  Believe it or not, Trump had black, female, young, gay, Hispanic and wealthy supporters, and Clinton had white, male, old, straight, and poor supporters.  Looking at the numbers broken down it is clear that there were certain dividing lines along which folks tended to vote, but there was no group that voted 100% for either candidate.  Somehow despite what Trump has said about women, he still had the support of 42% of them, and despite what he said about Mexicans, 29% of Hispanics voted for Trump.  To me, that speaks volumes.  If it does not speak volumes to you, then you do not understand the problem and ARE NOT HELPING.

Lumping in all Trump supporters as racist, misogynistic, half-breed idiots is exactly the thing that you were fighting against when Trump claimed that Mexican immigrants were criminals and rapists.  It's the exact same thing you were fighting against when Trump endorsed closing the US borders to Muslim immigrants.  You are generalising while fighting generalisations.  THAT IS NOT HELPING.

Worse still, a New York Times book review on Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 published about 6 weeks ago made absolutely no effort to conceal a thinly veiled comparison of Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler.  A teacher was suspended this past week for comparing Trump to Hitler.  There are other articles all over the internet making the same comparison.  As much as I disagree with Trump's philosophy, I find the comparison to one of the planet's most reviled humans in history absolutely revolting.  Again, I do not agree with Trump, but the comparison is disgusting and IS NOT HELPING.

This is the same situation that Obama has been in for the past 8 years as I have heard claim after claim that he is the next Fidel Castro and would destroy the United States by leading it into communism.  This has obviously not happened as the United States is just fine and is still (last I checked) a democracy.

I am not saying that capitulation is the right move.  I am not saying that you should give in or give up.  If you want to change the system, then fight to change the system.  If you want your candidate in office, fight for it.  But fight for it NEXT TIME.  Fight for a candidate you believe in, whose policies you endorse, and get that person elected.  NEXT TIME.  But fighting it after the fact because you don't like the result is denying the democratic wish of half the country and IS NOT HELPING.

If you want to wait for Trump to screw something up so royally that he gets impeached or is forced to resign, fine.  Do I think that will happen?  No I do not.  Wishing that it would happen is only wishing ill on the entire country, and THAT IS NOT HELPING.

I will take a moment here to repeat that I support neither Donald Trump nor the vast majority of what he has said and done throughout his campaign.  That said, I also would not have supported Hillary Clinton, Gary Johnson, or Jill Stein for various (and altogether different) reasons.  Hell, I would have voted "DocBastard 2016" if given the opportunity, and I guaran-damn-tee you I would have made a better president than ANY of these goddamned clowns.

*deep breath*

Regardless, the people of the United States need to take a good look in the mirror, take a deep breath, and figure out how exactly they want to proceed, and how they want the next 4 years of their lives to shape up.  Fighting and whining and complaining and protesting will not solve anything, it will only make things worse and guarantee a 2020 win for Trump.

As usual, I don't have all the answers.  Hell, I don't even know if I have any answer.  Except perhaps this one:

Monday 7 November 2016

Pure idiocy

In case you haven't noticed, recently I've tried getting away from calling my patients "idiots".  I've been trying my damndest to keep in mind that everyone makes mistakes and some people even have reasonable reasons for those mistakes.  People don't deserve to be crucified for doing stupid things, right?  Right, they simply need to be educated.  Jumping to calling people names is childish and silly (not to mention very judgmental), and I think of myself as better than that.  Call it the New And Improved Insult-Free DocBastard!

Having said that, Erin (not her real name™) is a fucking idiot.

I have never done illegal drugs in my life.  I've never felt the urge and I've never given into peer pressure, though I've been around many people who have.  I've never really understood why anyone would want to allow himself to be out of control of one's senses and/or body parts.  It just doesn't look like a good time.  Erin, on the other hand, got herself into heroin at a very young age.  At just 23, she had been in rehab twice already and was taking buprenorphine, an oral medication similar to methadone, to try to stay off heroin.

It wasn't working.  At all. 

One gloriously stupid evening 25-ish year old Erin stupidly decided that, in addition to taking her buprenorphine, she would also stupidly inject herself with heroin.  To add to the steaming, stinking stack of stupid, she then got in her car and drove . . . somewhere.  She apparently had no idea where she was going, because several minutes later she found herself in the middle of nowhere with her car wrapped around a tree.

Well, I shouldn't really say "she found herself", because she was completely unconscious and in no position to find much of anything except the inside of a morgue.  When the medics found her she was slumped over in the passenger seat next to a half-empty liquor bottle (and no, of course she wasn't wearing her seat belt).  They recognised the telltale track marks on her arm and rightly gave her a dose of naloxone to counteract the heroin they (correctly) suspected she had taken.  Normally patients who have overdosed on narcotics wake up immediately after being administered naloxone and are very angry that someone killed their high.  But not Erin.  She woke up only minimally because in addition to being high as a fucking kite, she was also drunk as a Tyrion Lannister (I greatly prefer him to skunks).

Fortunately for Erin (and unfortunately for me), she woke up a bit more on the ambulance ride to me, because when the medics oozed her into my trauma bay, she was fully awake.  And screaming.  Screaming at everyone and everything.  I've never been so angry that I've yelled at a complete stranger who was trying to take care of me, but that was exactly what Erin did, in addition to yelling at the floor, oxygen mask, and cervical collar.

"GET ME THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!  AAAAAH!  GET OFF OF ME!  AAAAAAAH!"

Sigh.  Just another Tuesday night.

My initial survey revealed a few abrasions here and there and a chronic-appearing ulcer on her leg, which looked suspiciously (read: obviously) like a former (or current) heroin injection site.  Of course I never found out because she refused to tell me anything.  When I got to her abdomen, she seemed to wince a bit when I pushed on her left side.

In the trauma world, that's an injured spleen until proven otherwise.

Unfortunately she wouldn't allow me to perform an ultrasound to see if she had blood around her spleen.  Her refrain of "GET THE HELL AWAY FROM ME!" kept ringing out, loud and clear.  After about 30 minutes she finally calmed down (i.e. sobered up) to the point where, instead of screaming at us, she was simply saying "Get away from me" in a calm (though rude) voice.

After much begging and cajoling, we finally convinced her to allow us to perform a CT scan of her abdomen, which continued to hurt rather significantly (though she wouldn't allow anyone to re-examine her).  If you've been reading this blog for any period of time, you can probably predict the outcome of the scan:

Actually, no you probably can't, because I enjoy fiddling with people.  You see, unlike most of the patients I write about, this one WASN'T uninjured.  She had a very nice laceration of her spleen (SURPRISE!) with a significant amount of blood around it.  An injury that severe doesn't usually require surgery, since the bleeding typically stops on its own).  But it does require close monitoring in hospital, preferably intensive care, with frequent blood draws to make sure that the bleeding actually stops (which it does about 90% of the time).

As I walked back to the trauma bay to give her the wonderful news, I thought about just how lovely and fun the next week or so of rounding would be, knowing that she would be a model patient: polite, cooperative, and pleasant to care for.  I probably had a visible scowl on my face when I walked in, but that scowl quickly changed to a gape. 

Erin was getting dressed.

The nurses were trying to calm her and get her to sit back down on the bed, but Erin was having none of it.  "I'm getting the hell OUT of here!"  I calmly and rationally (read: quickly and loudly) explained that she had a very serious injury and she had to stay here.  With me.  Oh, the joy.

"The hell I do!  I need to go home so I can smoke.  BYE!"

I again explained about her injury, why she should stay, and would could happen if she left.  If her spleen continued to bleed, she could easily bleed to death.  She listened, paused, and then demanded to see the papers she had to sign to leave against medical advice.  She also insisted that we not tell anything about her injury (or her drug use) to her father, who had apparently just arrived to see her.  Obviously she had been in this situation before, because she knew all the things to say that prevented us from caring for her in any way.  When her father walked in, she simply told him "I'm fine, dad.  Let's go."

And two minutes later, she was gone like Keyser Söze.

I have no doubt that Erin has pulled this shit before, and I have even less doubt that she will do it again, assuming her splenic laceration didn't kill her.  With her luck, she probably healed up just fine and went back to doing heroin the next day. 

Since as you know I'm a hopeless optimist and always try to see the good side of every story, here is the silver lining of this story: Erin lives well over 2 hours away from me, so the chance of her driving high and drunk again and encountering my wife driving my children around town is very close to zero.

But it is not zero.  And that scares the shit out of me.

Not dead

I'll start this post by answering a few questions that may or may not be burning in your mind: No, I'm not dead.  No, I didn't g...