Getting Older

My father once told his grand daughter, my niece that he was not really old, he was just older.

We are all getting older.  I celebrated my 60th birthday this summer.  This was a quiet celebration as have been most of the previous 59.  That is what happens when you have a summer birthday.  I did take a lot of time off this summer and went on two fabulous bike tours, so I guess I did have a nice birthday.

My parents are also getting older.  My father is 93 and my mother 88.   My father retired at 61 although he did some consulting after.  My parents had a very active retirement (although my mother as a housewife may not have noticed any retirement).  They traveled quite a bit; driving all over BC, Alberta and the Western US.  They also visited us quite a few times when we lived on the East Coast.  They toured Europe and Britain.   My father kept on gardening and with the extra time on his hands his garden became more elaborate.

They were however getting older.  One by one their siblings died until I have only one surviving aunt.  My father started to develop all the health problems, prostate cancer, atrial fibrillation (diagnosed by his urologist, most likely a publishable event), cataracts and an abdominal aneurysm repaired electively.  He also developed significant osteoarthritis in his knees which for some reason his family doctor didn't want to refer him to ortho for.  By the time I did the doctor thing and got an orthopod I knew to see him, all the above problems had presented and the orthopod prudently declined to operate.  My mother however remained in fairly good health and was with it.  While her mother died of TB in the 1930s, she had aunts on both sides who lived well into their 90s so I was anticipating a long life for her.  As my father became more and more crippled by his osteoarthritis, she became more and more his legs.

My parents continued to live in the house that they had lived in since 1960,  This was a single story house with a finished basement.  My mother cooked as cleaned as she had all their marriage, my father worked in his garden and did the yard work.  A few years ago, my mother disclosed to me that she wasn't sure that they could handle the house but that my father loved his garden and didn't want to move.  The garden was becoming smaller and less elaborate and shortly after his 90th birthday my father decided that this was his last garden.  They were getting a little help thru homecare and through Veterans Affairs.

Meanwhile my mother who suffered from macular degeneration, developed what might have been retinal detachments (I don't know for sure, the opthamologist wouldn't return my calls).  Last spring she told me, she could no longer read.  My mother loved to read as do I.  I felt very bad for her.

I had started visiting my parents every couple of months a few years ago.  I no longer had all the weekend sports and it didn't seem that expensive to fly to Victoria any more.  It was a nice trip, I would stay in a hotel and visit all my favourite places.  We would go out for dinner and my mother usually cooked lunch and occasionally dinner if I was leaving later on Sunday.

Last June (2016) I visited my parents and had a very nice visit.  My mother made us lunch and on Sunday because I had a later flight, she made a nice Sunday dinner.  She was at that time having the vision problems but the house was clean and they were nicely dressed.

I came back in August.  Again everything seemed okay.  I arrived mid morning, we had tea and then my mother made lunch.  We went out for dinner on Saturday.  Sunday I drove them out in the country and we went to a nice restaurant for lunch.  I was flying home around supper and told them I would eat at the airport on the way home.

So it was that around 1500, having tea my mother said to me, "you know if you had more education, you could get a better job".  Hey I know I'm just an anaesthesiologist.  She then asked me where I lived and who I was married too.  Thinking back over the weekend, I began to suspect she had not known who I was all weekend.  I left feeling somewhat shattered.

Monday I phoned home hoping to talk to my father. My mother answered the phone, recognized my voice and we talked for a few minutes before I was able to talk to my father.  He confirmed that she had been acting like that for some time now.  I contacted my brothers and one of them who had visited earlier in August, confirmed that she had been acting like that when he visited.  He also revealed that she had been falling over as well.

Concerned about (but secretly hoping it was) a subdural, I phoned her family doctor, got a locum told her the story and the locum was able to arrange a CT scan in uncommon speed for a GP.  This was normal except for atrophy.

A family meeting was convened with two of my brothers and me.  My parents or rather my father agreed that it was time to move to some type of facility.  My father has a good pension and they had considerable assets so a private facility was available for them
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I am not going to go in detail all of what has gone down in the last year except that it was about 10 months that I never again want to experience.   My mother now lives in a "reminiscence unit", which is a locked ward for patients with dementia and a tendency to wander.  Reminiscence is a nice euphemism for a place inhabited by people who can remember events from the 1930s but can't remember the names of their children or what you told them 5 minutes ago.  My father as of a couple of weeks ago lives in the same building on  a different floor.  He is allowed to visit my mom but can't take her off the unit.

As it happened just over 6 months ago, we got a phone call that my mother in law was in the emergency with back and leg pain and not really able to walk.  Again not going into all the nuts and bolts of what went down but she is now in a nice facility in Burnaby having moved out of her condo.

Life as my father or maybe it was somebody else observed doesn't come with a users manual and I have learned more about getting older than I ever wanted to.  In no particular order.:

Seniors care is very expensive and somebody is making a lot of money off it.

My parents are currently spending between $10 and $20K a month for the rather nice place they are currently living.  My mother in law who had much less assets was after some time eligible for subsidized care.  However when we first placed her in her first assisted living facility she had to pay a significant extra amount of money to have someone dispense her medications and bath her.  This is despite the fact that the person providing the service is probably getting paid the minimum wage for the time spent providing the service.  This is also the case for the nice people who look after my parents.  There is a RN in their building but I suspect she is getting less than she would be getting by working in a hospital.a

Not all nursing homes are created equal.

I of course should have known that that.  We found a nice seniors home for my parents in their neighbourhood with a room available within 6 weeks.  My wife, then I suddenly realized that this was totally not the right place for my mom but the wheels were in motion and so that was where my parents went.  We told the administration right up front my mother's mental state realizing we might sabotage the move and to their credit they were very accommodating especially for a for-profit facility. 

There are in fact multiple levels of care, which overlap and some are available in the same building some are not.  Researching this was very complex.  This may mean divorce by nursing home.

There are of course public and private facilities to consider as well.  It is interesting that in Canada, everybody gets treated equally in the healthcare system (not really) but that where and how live as senior is so dependent on your income or what programs you are eligible for.

Staying in your home might be important but a lot of people can't do it.

The mantra since I was in medical school has been to keep seniors in their homes and we go to elaborate lengths to do this, not necessarily sometimes in the best interest of the elder or their support people.  My father really wanted badly to stay in his house which complicated things incredibly and my brothers and I (most me) tried to figure out scenarios where both my parents could stay in their home.  My parents are quite well off, money would not have been an object; however on thinking things over there was no way they could have possibly stayed in their home, even with the best of help.  This did not stop me from feeling like I had let the team down.
My mother in law on the other hand was an inpatient and it became clear that she could not go back to her condo.  She was eligible for subsidized care, however when we approached people about that we were advised that she could not go directly to subsidized care from hospital; she would have to go home first, fail her trial of home care and then go to subsidized care.  We had the means to put her in a non-subsidized care facility from which she was able to apply to the lovely subsidized care facility she currently lives in.  Had she not had the means to go into a private facility, however she might still be involved in a Mexican standoff where they say she has to go to her home but she can't possibly go to her home.  I am pretty sure that scenario is being played out in lots of hospitalized seniors.

Rather than being pro-active the system is set up for seniors to fail.

Even 30+ years ago when I came out in practice, they were talking about the silver tsunami although they may not have had such a catchy name.

In Canada we have socialized medicine, every person has a health care number, almost every person has some contact with the health care system, every person pays income tax or receives some form of government assistance, a great deal of seniors pay property tax.  In other words there is a huge repository of demographic information available.

So why are we  so surprised every time we have a senior with failure to thrive?  Why do we wait for seniors to end up in an acute care bed or the ER.  Why aren't we proactive?  It is quite likely for example that if I hadn't visited my parents that particular month, nobody would have realized just how far my mother had declined.  Sure, you can say the family should have some responsibility.  This ignores the reality that living in the same city you grew up in is the exception not the rule and that the children of seniors are mature adults who have jobs, look after their own kids and not infrequently have health issues of their own.

When I was department head, I had to attend Medical Advisory Committee meetings.  Most of those meetings involved various members of the administration telling us about the crisis of seniors in the ER or on the hospital wards.  Once I piped up, something to the effect that why don't we look upstream and try and prevent these people from ending up in a place they and we don't want them to go to.  Nice idea, said someone in a suit and we went on to the next topic.

What about geriatricians.  Geriatricians exist.  The problem is they largely work in hospitals where they see people who have already failed the system or in hospital clinics where after being on a long wait list you can get assessed.  Not out in the community putting out fires like they should be. 

Family docs?  Both my parents had pretty good family docs.  The problem is that it is very difficult providing the type of care seniors need in a fee for service system, while looking after the rest of your sick and not so sick patients.

Not everybody ages at the same rate.

I sort of knew this but visiting my parents in two different seniors' home brought it home to me.  The seniors' population is a heterogenous group with very different needs.  Closer to home, this means that a couple may not age at the same rate.  My mother for example doesn't recognize  me, my father's mind is still as sharp as every.  This leads to the phenomena of divorce by nursing home where because of different care needs a couple cannot stay in the same facility.  My parents are lucky enough to now live in the same building but in different rooms on different floors.

Even individuals don't age at the same rate.  I was astonished by the precipitous decline in my mother's mentation even though she may have been hiding it well.  The swift decline form a fully functioning individual to something way less than that, constant catches family and the healthcare system off guard.  It shouldn't.

A week or so ago, a pain clinic patient asked me if I was going to retire.  "Not right now", I said, "but I just turned 60 and things can change in a hurry."

Have I  learned anything from this?

My parents' generation largely didn't deal with this because people died at younger ages from infections or from heart disease or cancer for which there were fewer treatment options.  Therefore faced with their own fragile longevity they have no idea what to do because they never had to deal with elders in the same predicament when they were young.

I am starting to learn and hopefully plan my own senescence. 

Firstly, I  assume that at some point I will not be able to drive.  By that time I  will probably lack the insight into this so it is better to quit well before I am forced to.  This also means living in a place where the services are within walking distance (which  also might be a problem) or that there is good public transport. 

I am  going to need medical services.  I have a good family doctor.   For the rest of you, this means if you don't have a family doctor, you better get one who is a lot younger than you.  Preferably one who isn't an idiot and who works more than 3 days a week.  When choosing what town I am  going to live in, I now have to factor in what medical services are available locally.  This is important if I want to retire overseas as I often threaten to do.

There is of course planning my  home and will I be able to live in it in the future.  Better figure out how you are going to climb those stairs when you have generalized osteoarthritis or heart disease.  The necessary renovations are going to cost money and despite what my financial advisor tells me, I know I am going to have less of that in retirement.  I joked when visiting seniors homes about, "see you in 10 years" but maybe it is more realistic to go into a home when you want to, not when you have to.

There is of course the whole advanced directive thing.  I am pretty health right now and barring metastatic cancer or something like ALS I would probably like a little CPR.  Problem is that by the time I shouldn't be getting a little CPR or the related trimmings, I may not have the insight.  Better discuss this with somebody sensible now.  Make sure they are prepared to advocate for you because there are quite a few doctors out there who are prepared aggressively treat you, based on their religious belief, hospital policies or the irrational fear of  being sued.

In closing

As my parents started to push 90, believing that longevity is genetic, I rejoiced in my potential long life. 

Not so sure about that now.

You break it, you buy it

I saw 4 patients that morning.  2 of the patients were young men who were cancer survivors.  Unfortunately combinations of surgery, radiation and chemotherapy have left them with disabling neuropathic pain, which in both cases prevents them from working.

Naturally if you read the progress notes from the Cancer agency you will read glowing, back patting descriptions of the success of their cancer regimen.  Both men are going to survive.

The problem is that both of them have severe pain, and nobody really wants to address it.  Despite what you may read in the American and sometimes in the Canadian media, cancer patients actually get quite good care in Canada with a huge infrastructure of nurse practitioners, social workers, psychologists and patient navigators.  If you are dying of cancer, you will go into a similarly endowed palliative program.  This is as it should be; when my cells start acting in an antisocial fashion, I want it all there for me.

If you are "cured" of cancer however you enter the dismal world of the Canadian healthcare system with its waiting lists and silos of care.  Unfortunately if you have chronic pain nobody really wants to take ownership of you, least of all the oncologists and surgeons who caused the problem in the first place.  This usually leaves it to chronic pain "specialists" like me who are stupid enough to still want to see these patients.  We are usually not talking about narcotics here although that is what they frequently need; anticonvulsants or antidepressants are often effective but I frequently see a patient who has gone for the 18 months or so my wait list is, without trialing them at all.

When you think about it, it takes a special kind of sociopath to leave a patient in pain as a consequence of their treatment, (even if they did save the patient's life) and not feel responsible to at least do something to try and help the patient or at least direct him to someone who can.  Back surgeons are of course big offenders in this regard.

Working in my other life as an anaesthesiologist I see the other face.  As I work in a big city hospital, in what could sometimes be seen as tertiary care, a lot of the work we do in OR, is as a consequence of surgery done at other sites, usually out in the country, often by somebody who had no business doing that complexity of surgery but also alarmingly from within the city.  I often pity my general surgery colleagues who get stuck with complications of gynae or urological surgery.  Talking about podiatrists to one of our orthopods is a sure fire way to generate a long rant.

We anaesthesiologists of course get to tag along on these little misadventures because they almost always end up in the OR, usually after hours, occasionally bumping the enjoyable list you thought you had, often in ICU with 20 infusion pumps going or with MRSA, VRE, XYZ etc.  I remember early in my career noting that I had worked until 0400 all on complications of surgery done at other sites.

And we all love to hear of the patient with the post-spinal headache in the ER, who had her baby at another hospital or who had a misadventure with a lumbar puncture.

My chronic pain side is not immune.  I get to struggle with the patients put on megadoses of narcotics by other people, those on big doses of benzos and of course the sloughs from my colleagues who have exhausted their repertoire of lucrative blocks and now want me to manage their patient medically.

Complications are a consequence of medicine and modern medicine is really just a bet that the benefits of the procedure or treatment outweigh the adverse effects, transient or permanent.  This is a bet patients frequently lose.   Sometimes the adverse effects are something we can deal with ourselves, sometimes in the best interest of the patient, some else is better able to deal with it.  It would be nice if there was some mutual respect and communication.

Does one battle define a country?

Today is the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge which we are told established Canada as a country.

Just to establish my bona fides; my grandfather was in the Battle of Vimy Ridge.  Unfortunately he died in the 1930s and I never knew him; I only have one photo of him.  He was wounded there which eventually along with being gassed earlier in the war lead to his premature death.  He did meet my mother an English nurse who he married and brought back to Canada.  It could be said that without the battle of Vimy Ridge, I wouldn't be here.  In fact if you take into the fact the butterfly effect, the world might be very different without the battle of Vimy Ridge.

Vimy Ridge was the first battle entirely fought by Canadians.  Not entirely, there was a British General Lord Byng.  Lord Byng later became Governor General of Canada.  Notwithstanding the battle of Vimy Ridge, it would be another 20+ years before a Canadian could be trusted to be Governor General.  Lord Byng's wife, Lady Byng is much more famous: she donated the trophy given yearly to the most gentlemanly player in the NHL.  Those of us interested in constitutional law will remember Lord Byng in another context.

I haven't read much about the Battle of Vimy Ridge but the underlying principle of the battle seemed to be that if you bomb the shit out of the other side and aren't terribly worried about casualties (a large reason why Canadian rather than English or French troops were in the battle) you will win more often than you lose.  The battle was of questionable significance in the long run.

The thing is however.....

The First Nations have been in the territory which became Canada for 10,000 plus years.  The first (non-Viking) European contact was in 1497.  The first permanent settlement in the early 1600s.  The boundaries essentially established after the American Revolution.  A lot of history, a lot of people lived and died to create was is now Canada.

So can you really boil all that down to one battle even if my grandfather was there.

Drug Costs

We had a little breakfast presentation by the Sugamadex people last Friday.  Not a bad breakfast and an okay talk by one of their scientific people, a little dry.

Unfortunately any discussion of a drug basically comes down to, "can we afford it; will the hospital put it on formulary?"  The answer came about 50 minutes into the talk, after we had finished our breakfast and were on our second cups of coffee.  The answer was $100.  That is for the smallest dose, the dose for mild-moderate block, the dose that some of us depending on circumstances don't even reverse.  If you go for deep block, like when your resident listens to the surgeon's whining and gives rocuronium while they are closing, multiple by two.  If you want to immediately reverse rocuronium like for example when you give 50 mg to the guy with no chin and realize you can't intubate him (and can barely bag him), you are talking serious cash.

Now neostigmine is not the nicest drug in the world.  I consider it the most dangerous drug in my drug cart.  Surprisingly pharmacy who insist on putting high alert stickers on my midazolam compartment haven't figured that out yet.  It is considerably cheaper however although the price is said to be going up due the Merck buying the licences off all the generic companies who used to make it.

Sugamadex is with a few little wrinkles a better drug than Neostigmine, just as a Ferrari is a better care than my VW Jetta.  My VW Jetta gets me to work on time however.

I have no idea how much it costs to make Sugamadex, even taking into account the inflated R+D costs companies claim they have to pay.  I suspect it isn't anywhere near $100.  Currently they are selling almost no drug at all in Canada.  The question comes, is there a price where the company can make a profit which balances with the hospital paying a little bit more for what is a better drug, which might actually save money by shortening recovery room stays and reducing complications.  I should have asked but I bet I wouldn't have got a straight answer.

Incomplete reversal of muscle relaxants seems to be getting a lot more attention in the literature and at meetings, some of which I suspect is being driven by the makers of Sugamadex and their stable of tame physicians who can write articles and speak at meetings.  I trained at the tail end of the pancuronium-curare era, which gave me a healthy respect for muscle relaxants.  The problem is of course, I suspect we see more incomplete reversal now than we did with pancuronium, if only because people have lost their respect for muscle relaxants.  I have learned that adding a muscle relaxant probably increases your complication rate.  I do a lot more cases with a LMA spontaneously breathing now, I still use sux and quite often if I am just intubating to protect the airway, I don't bother with a non-depolarizing agent, unless the patient is bucking or the surgeon is whining.   Even when using a non-depolarizer, I tend to be sparing in how much I use and quite often if I don't need muscle relaxation have the patient spontaneously breathing or on pressure support by the end of an hour.

The Sugamadex people have cottoned on to the fact that hospitals are not about to pay $100 for a drug, at least not for an anaesthetic drug, no matter how good it is.  The spin last Friday, was getting it indicated for high risk populations like the frail elderly, sleep apnea and high BMI patients.  Probably a good idea, however unless the hospital polices it, you are going to get indication creep.  If you need it for the BMI 45, what about the BMI 44 and so on.  Of course regulation could lead to you trying to call the on call pharmacist at 0400 because you want to use Sugamadex.  Neither very good options.

I was talking later that day with the surgeon and was discussing our morning rounds.  He observed that where a drug that cost $100 used to be considered expensive, now $1000 to $10000 is not unusual.

End? of paper

There are two things that,  if in 1983, you had told me I would still be doing in 2017, I would have called you crazy.

The first is billing fee for service.

The second is charting on paper.

The end may be in sight however.  Last Friday's pain clinic at my main hospital site was the last before the electronic medical record rolls out.  Fortunately I only work alternate weeks so my hope is that all the bugs will be sorted out next week.  There is a huge team of people involved in setting this up.  I attended a meeting with about 10 of them in a large war-room with white boards all over the wall.  I wonder if the money spent on this might be better spent elsewhere.

I work at a variety of sites and so have been exposed to 4 different EMRs all of which are entirely different from each other.  Fortunately the EMR I will be using in a week or so is one I already use at another hospital, which means that I already took the mandatory training and did all the privacy and security stuff.  The IT people who are supervising the whole process keep on referring to me as a star.  I also get invited to "physician champion" meetings which I never attend.  Sorry, guys I already know the system and I am the only person in my department.

It is interesting how the logistics of a paperless system affect your practice.  For the first few months we have been advised to book fewer patients as charting can be expected to take longer.  The other issue is that we are nowhere near the end of paper.  At one place I work which has an EMR,  a parallel paper chart is kept, at another they insist on printing out my most recent note for me to read every visit.  I keep on telling them that I can read the electronic chart but they insist on it.  In addition because none of the 4 EMRs can communicate, if you want records from one practice the only recourse is to print out the record and send it where it is scanned into the other record.  All lab and imaging reports are now available on the provincial electronic record but they still insist upon sending me paper copies as well.

Canada has a socialized medical system which means it should have been easy to set up a universal electronic medical record.  For example if I see a patient with headaches, I should be able to pull up the neurologist's consult.  If however I want a copy, it will most likely be a paper copy mailed or faxed to me, often not available when I am seeing the patient.  Larger HMOs in the US have a single medical record, as do  the doctors in one small Canadian province.

As I blogged a few years ago, we had an issue where multiple miscommunications lead to a patient's testicular cancer diagnosis and treatment being delayed and the patient ultimately dying.  This lead to a lot of hand-wringing and promises to fix the system.  Much of this could have been solved by an integrated EMR which nobody including me, seemed to have the balls to suggest.  Our medical society is trying to set up a secure electronic portal where doctors can communicate with each other confidentially (except for the NSA and the Russians of course).  The problem is of course that such a system is of no use unless there is close to 100% buy in and I don't see that happening because for most doctors miscommunications are someone else's problem.  I have never really seen the problem with just using email.  Is it any less secure that faxing.  How often have you found someone else's fax stapled to one of your faxes.  Anyway I have a personal fax which emails me a PDF.  When someone tells me they can't email me something because of confidentiality issues, I tell them "Just fax it to me".  They do and the faxed gets emailed to me.  I don't point out the contradiction.

Our province has a flawed but wonderful system called NetCare where it is possible to access just about all the blood work and X-rays going back 15 years.   In addition you can get every medication dispensed to the patient.  As well anything that is dictated in a hospital system is accessible.  I can't imagine how I lived without it.  However you still cannot access anything done in a private office and in addition there are quite a few physicians who handwrite their consults and admission histories.  Progress notes which are still handwritten are not available either.  Still way better than the old days when the patient would come in saying he was taking a blue and a green pill and wanted to discuss his MRI results which you didn't have.  NetCare is easy to get on in the hospital, less so outside of the hospital where you need a key fob and a lot of good luck to get on.  (I can access my own chart on NetCare, I'm not supposed to but I do, it is after all my medical information.  My family doctor was horrified when I told him this and set me up with a patient portal where I can access my records, legally but why should I have to memorize another set of log-ins).

Mostly where I have been using EMRs have been low volume practices and I am looking with some horror at my hospital clinic tomorrow where I typically see 24 or so patients.  The EMR people assure me that they will be on site and I have done the appropriate training and have set up the appropriate shortcuts that will make charting easier for me.

I have heard that EMRs have lead to dissatisfaction in doctors that have them, although doctors have a lot of reasons to be dissatisfied and in the 30 or so years I have been in practice I have never seen any doctor completely satisfied with all the aspects of his/her practice.  EMRs certainly are cumbersome, usually requiring multiple log-ins, and their tendency to randomly shutdown or kick you out of the system.  The EMR I am using today refused to let me write prescriptions under my  name, I got around this by printing the prescription under someone else's name and then crossing it out on the paper copy.  I have been assured this will be fixed today.  You do have to remember that paper charts were not the greatest either, trying to decipher your handwriting or looking for labwork that may or may not have been filed were definitely hassles not to mention the effect on patient care.

I have recently been doing a lot of medicolegals which mean a lot of chart reviews.  These have given me to opportunity to compare both paper and electronic charts.  Paper copies of electronic charts have of course the advantage of being legible.  The quality of the information is not better and potentially a little worse as I suspect a lot of doctors are typing with two fingers.  Most EMRs have shortcuts or macros available and I notice that these are being used quite a bit.  For example many family doctors have a macro for their yearly physical exam (notwithstanding the fact that nobody advocates a yearly physical, most patients seem to get one done, if only because the doctor can bill for it).  I have for example reviewed cases with severe neck or back pain, well documented in the progress notes who when they present for their yearly physical will have a completely normal exam documented on the obviously computer generated record.  This is I am sure going to cause problems when somebody less understanding than me reviews the chart.  I have also heard of instances in hospitals where people are cutting and pasting other people's consults or progress notes.  This is of course okay (if a little lazy) if the original information that was cut and pasted was valid, however the old saying garbage in/garbage out comes to mind.  False information, (alternate facts) of course persisted under paper charting as well.

The other issue I notice when I review medico-legal charts is the incredible volume of paper they can generate especially if the patient is admitted to hospital.  For example, at the hospitals in another city which has EMRs, each lab test is printed out on a separate piece of paper, likewise nurses notes.  This results in a huge chart, which if I get it in paper, means lots of turning pages and a high risk of paper cuts and repetitive strain injuries.  Lawyers tend to do fishing expeditions resulting in large amounts of irrelevant information.  I get paid by the hour so I shouldn't mind but the hours available to me are finite and I know that somebody is ultimately paying for this.  Logically when they get the request the hospital would give me a time sensitive log-in to their system for that one patient's chart so I can review on a computer.  It is after all the 21st century.

Fortunately or unfortunately an EMR for anaesthesia or AIMS as they like to call it seems to be years away.  We did spend a great deal of time getting ready for one about 5 years ago with multiple meetings however suddenly without even a whimper the whole process just ground to a halt. I don't see any sign of it restarting and I don't expect to be using it before I retire.

When people express fear or dissatisfaction about EMRs, I remember a story a specialist told me when I was a resident in Newfoundland.  He had started his career working in a remote community as a general practitioner in the 1960s.  When he arrived, he found that the clinic there did not keep any patient records.  He was appalled and told the staff that they would have to start keeping charts on patients, with the result that the entire staff resigned in protest.

Like all changes in healthcare, we will survive this and patient care might even be improved.

Bruce &. Me

I just finished reading Bruce Springsteen's autobiography "Born to Run".  It is not just a recitation of his personal history, it is a very introspective and philosophical book.  More articulate people than me have reviewed it.

Before we started getting our music on iPods, satellite radio and oldies stations, music was the soundtrack of our lives.  Often times now when I hear a song from the seventies or early eighties, even the sixties it will evoke a memory of a period in my life or even a specific event.  It was simpler then, a song or and album was released, you listened to the song or the album on the radio, maybe you bought it and listened to it heavily, then another song or album came out. 

I still remember where I was the first time I heard of Bruce Springsteen.  It was in the lunch room at the Lake Cowichan Forest Service research station where I worked as a field hand.  It was the summer between high school and university.  I can't remember whether it was Time or Newsweek I was reading, he was on the cover of both.  I remember not being that impressed.  I hadn't heard any of his music, there was a lot of good music our there in the mid 70s.  I had, a few months earlier bought Bob Dylan's "Blood on the Tracks", an album that transformed my musical tastes permanently and I could not believe any artist could be better.  Many of the artists of the 1970s like Paul McCartney and Elton John were still at the top of their games.

Notwithstanding the success of the album Born to Run, Springsteen got very little airplay in Vancouver either on the AM top 40 stations or on the "album oriented" FM station I listened to.  He got very little play on the Seattle FM stations I occasionally listened to.  In the subsequent years I read stories about him.  He seemed a little different.  He had a saxophone in his band; nobody had saxophones in their bands.  In retrospect listening to Born to Run, it was so different from what passed for Rock and Roll in the 1970s that I can understand his lack of exposure.  

I bought Bruce's album "Darkness on the Edge of Town" in 1978, the summer I got accepted to medical school.  I don't remember why I bought it, I think somebody told me that it was a good album and so I picked it up.  I think I bought Dylan's "Street Legal" around the same time.  Never really listened to that one as much as I listened to "Darkness".

1978 was a dark time for music.  Disco had taken over the dance floors and the radio stations.  Rock and roll was heading down the toilet.  Paul McCartney was releasing mediocre albums, soon to become bad albums, likewise Elton John.  The Eagles had peaked with Hotel California.  Fleetwood Mac followed up "Fleetwood Mac" and "Rumours" with "Tusk".  Dylan was about to enter his Christian phase with the accompanying bad albums.  The Band had just (temporarily) stopped touring and releasing new music.  It was a dark time to be a rock and roll fan or for that matter a folkie.  It was maybe for this reason I reached out and bought a Springsteen album. 

I remember listening to "Darkness" as a life changing, least a musical life changing moment similar to what I experienced when I first heard "Blood on the Tracks".  Darkness became the soundtrack of my first year in Medical School.  I spread out, I bought "Born to Run".  Later I bought "Asbury Park" and the "Wild, the Innocent...".  Bruce still wasn't getting a lot of airplay in the late 1970s.  

Then came "The River".  Some have criticized it as too long, a double album that could have been edited down to a single album.  No way.  Every song was a great song, the album worked conceptually, when that was important in an album.  Springsteen also moved into the mainstream with that album with a top 40 hit.  I didn't mind sharing him with others, it made me feel cool  thinking I had listened to him way back when.  "The River" is the soundtrack of the second half of medical school for me.

Bruce Springsteen wrote about working in factories, unplanned pregnancies and New Jersey.  He didn't write about growing up middle class in Victoria, going to good schools and going to medical school.  There is no way his music should have appealed to me.  It did though.

I finished Medical School, and went to Halifax to intern.  One day I was browsing in a record store on Barrington street and there it was, another Bruce Springsteen Album.  "Nebraska", so different from his other albums except possibly "Greetings...". I bought it and listened to it obsessively.  It became the soundtrack of my internship.   It was like the Bob Dylan album he should have been releasing at that time, except it was by Bruce Springsteen.       

I finished my internship and bummed around doing locums in the Maritimes.  I taped my Springsteen albums and listened to them on the tape deck in my in my car.  When I wasn't working, I used to drive around the backroads of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick just exploring.  Sometimes now when I hear a song off those albums I think about those drives.  I met my future wife and starting making trips back to Halifax where she lived from where I was, usually with Springsteen on the tape deck.

I got engaged in 1984 and Springsteen released "Dancing in the Dark".  Just a coincidence I'm sure.  Suddenly he was a superstar with Top 40 hits and MTV videos.  He started playing and selling out stadiums.  If I had been in Vancouver when he sold out BC place, I would not have been able to get a ticket. 

I got married, failed in general practice and went back east to Newfoundland to do a residency.  Springsteen also got married, just coincidence.  Mid-way through my residency he released "Tunnel of Love" a depressing if listenable album.  

Musically I was evolving.  I used to have a 30 minute commute to work, where I listened to the Rock FM station.  One day, I decided I could not take the talk and the bad music and switched to CBC FM which played classical music back then.  I pretty much exclusively listened to classical music for the next 5 years. A surgeon in the OR used to play the blues during his marathon cases.  I acquired a taste for the blues.  

I had my first child, finished my residency and got my first job in Fredericton.  I had another child and moved to Edmonton.  Somewhere around that time Springsteen released 'Lucky Town" and "Human Touch" simultaneously.  I of course bought them just like I used to buy Paul McCartney and Elton John's album when they came out, but the bloom was off the rose.  The first year I was in Edmonton, Springsteen came to Edmonton (without the E Street Band) and I didn't even try to go.  

I went to the Edmonton Folk Festival because I wanted to see Elvis Costello but stayed for the whole weekend.  I learned that folk music wasn't just a bunch of people singing Kumbaya, it was vibrant, interesting and it was the root behind the music I had loved in the past.  I started buying CDs from the Folk Festival CD tent and listening to CKUA, our province's public radio station which played that kind of music.  

Throughout the 90s Springsteen was a lesser part of my musical life.  I figured it was the natural order of things.  One can only be great for so long.  I had grown, he had grown.  I still bought the albums,  I bought his box set "Tracks".  My listening habits changed.  I got an MP3 player and started playing my, by then, large collection on shuffle.

Along the way, I had never heard Springsteen play live.  I interned with a fellow who had the fortune to see him play the El Mocambo club in Toronto in the mid 90s.  Actually he had seen him there for 2 consecutive nights.  His long shows were legendary.  I was jealous.

There is only one thing that I am thankful to George W. Bush for.  In 2002, I was going to Cannes on a Big Pharma junket when Bush Jr., decided to invade Iraq in search of weapons of mass destruction.  Because we all knew that Saddam controlled world terrorism I was afraid to fly and cancelled my flight.  Bruce Springsteen just happened to be playing in Edmonton during the time I was supposed to be getting brainwashed in Cannes and he hadn't sold out so my wife and I bought tickets.  They were just over $200 each, the most I had ever paid for a concert.  The tickets were general admission on the floor what used to be called festival seating. (In his book Bruce notes that early on his band never allowed festival seating for fear of a stampede to the stage).  We had to line up in cold sleet before being herded into the stadium where we were able to grab territory in front of the stage at about the blue line.  It was a long wait for the concert to start made worse by not being able to leave the primo real estate we were standing on.  

There is really no way to describe a Springsteen concert.  You really have to be there.  Being on floor relatively close to the stage, it felt like I was watching in the small club.  The entire E Street band was there and the whole affair felt like a giant party.  There were of course the 3 encores.  

I had a few months prior to the concert bought "The Rising" but had never really connected with the album.  When I heard the songs from the album performed, they suddenly made sense and the album was for a while an album I listened to a lot.

I left with my bond with Bruce restored.  It was an amazing experience.  

In the next few years, I reflexively bought the albums Bruce released regularity often at Starbucks.  They are for sure not as good as his first 5 albums.   Then again how many artists can claim to have 5 great albums.  Did we expect Einstein to come with another theory of relativity.  

Then as I mentioned above I read Bruce's biography over a couple of days after Christmas.  I have satellite radio and decided to to listen for a few longer drives.  The one thing that struck me which should have struck me earlier was what a good lyricist he is.  Many of his songs tell a story in a rhyming but never forced fashion which few song  writers including Nobel laureate Bob Dylan can boast of.  

It has been an almost 40 year journey during which I have grown from Top 40 pop to more eclectic tastes in music.  Bruce Springsteen has been an important part of that journey.

Up date on you're fired.

I posted on this last year.

It appears that this has been resolved and nobody is getting fired.

I did read a long statement with all the appropriate buzzwords by the Head of the Section of Anaesthesia in BC.

This doesn't really state who blinked, if anybody, although I suspect it was the docs who did the bending over.