Welcome to the Hole!

Part I: Meaningless drivel (movies)
A) Oh Harry Potter the Fourth, you have finally come to be a real movie. How many double entendres did you count? How many Frodo-faces? He made a couple, or rather, the camera did.
And to my dissapointment, the kids don't make face with each other. Sigh.
The people next to me at the Vista wanted to share their popcorn, and so I felt like an orphan taken in from the alleyways of London. The row of gay men in front of me did a synchronized "hand dance" along with the "Enjoy a refreshing cola!" ad before the trailers. People always clap when the ad is over, whoop and holler. It makes me laugh when they do that. People do funny things at the Vista.
B) Joaquin and his not-a-cleft-palate, got-it-in-a-fight-with-my-brother-that-I-refuse-to-talk-about scar. I liked the nuzzling, the scene at the lunch counter, the peanuts, Reese WItherspoon's freckles, and absolutely everything else. Jerry Lee Lewis had some nasty lyrics.
C) I finally got around to seeing Monster too this weekend (and I started Into Thin Air as well, having finished book one of the naval novels). Not a new revelation, but man is Christina Ricci sucky. Fortunately, things tend to work themselves out and henceforth even though I had a hypothesis that maybe Charlize was being overpraised, I was wrong. I would also recommend the HBO documentary.
I am now about to try to watch The Notebook, but I don't think I'll be able to make it through.


Part II: Small, potentially meaningful story from my daily life:
Today was my first day semi-quasi-hemi-solo in the PICU. I had two patients on my own, in the Hole. The Hole is one of our two quad rooms, e.g. there are 4 patients in a room. You might barely leave the Hole for all your 12 hours, except to go for breaks. Sometimes the Holes are vacant and quiet, half-full, and you go about your business. Sometimes you're alone in your hole with an unconscious/sedated patient, so every now and then a heard of medical residents, fellows and attending will meander into the Hole during rounds or someone outside the Hole will pop their head in and say "Come on out of the Hole for a sec". Today there were no vacancies. Four patients, three RNs and two nurse residents, plus assorted family members. Over in one corner was one of my patients, a 14 year old who had taken to yelling "Sarah can you please get my flema?" (phlegm in Spanish, quite endearing). He'd chase this ten minutes later with an expressive sentence en Espanol involving the word 'puta' or 'hija de puta', e.g., some take on "whore". He'd often include his dear mother in the insult. He can't help it. Yesterday he told me to - and I quote -"take it in the ass" when I asked if he wanted pain medicine. We use a universal pain scale with numbers and faces on it to help kids tell us how bad their pain is...I asked him to rate his pain and he said "What the FUCK is wrong with you goddamn people?". He says it with a slur to his speech of course.
I couldnt help but empathize in a way. If I was a teenager and I had a tube coming, say, straight out of the center of my brain and someone asked me to point at a face or a number to describe my pain - no matter how mindful the inquisitor was of not sounding patronizing - I might turn inside out like a sea cucumber after holding up my middle finger to delineate where I fit on the scale.

I was there when some good news about his prognosis came down the line, and there were tears and hugs, so it was a good day.