WARNING: Due to the graphic nature of this blog, readers are advised

The reason I get to be Eloise and live in a hotel is because I work here.  There are 440 high school kids mostly from Texas staying here for 10 days because they want a career in the medical field.  What this means for me is long days, short night sleeps and seeing really, really gross things.  Yesterday the county medical investigator came and spoke to the students and brought pictures.  Really graphic pictures of homicidal investigations.  Bones, blood, maggots, shattered heads, stab wounds, etc.  I couldn't look at most of the pictures.  Especially the man in Alabama who had his head bashed in with a two by four.  No bueno.  Weird things happen in Alabama.  Remind me not to go there.  

Then we watched a live total knee replacement surgery where the kids got to ask the surgeon questions while he worked.  I thought I wouldn't be able to watch it but it was pretty amazing so I watched the whole thing - even when they got the drill out.  

But I saved the best for last.  There are a couple nights where we have about 20 speakers come to talk to groups of students about their specialties.  It isn't always physicians or residents so they can get an idea of other professions within the medical field.  We had an art therapist, someone on domestic violence, a woman who makes artificial limbs for children, yada, yada.  But the best one we had was a midwife who delivered her OWN five children before she was even a midwife.  Because "in the 70s they were still tying women down to the table to deliver" she told me before she spoke.  Um...were you at a veterinarians hospital?  That doesn't sound right.  So she became a midwife to help others.  So she speaks to the students and tells them how bad doctors and hospitals are and how she only had to pay $5 to become a midwife.  Awesome, tell the kids all they have to do is pay $5 to be able to deliver other peoples children.  Then she shows them a video of a water birth she did with a completely naked woman in kiddie pool with her husband massaging her back and her 3 year playing in the pool at the same time.  So a kid asks her if there is a chance for bacterial infection with the other child playing in the pool at the same time and she tells him "no, they're a family".  Last time I checked, bacteria was not bowing to family ties.  And the cherry on top was the slides she showed after the water birth of her own vagina.  That's right, her own vagina during birth.  The kids were all freaked out about her showing her own body parts.  Needless to say she is not being invited back.  But it made the rest of us laugh pretty hard.  

That story almost over-shadowed the MASSIVE hernia I saw today in an ER.  Nasty.