a fun post, a serious note, and pictures of the dog

Despite my best efforts and a flu shot, I'm sick. For the past two days I've been running a fever of about 101 degrees, and laying in bed with just the dog and a bottle of Amantadine to keep me company.

It's only tangentially related to talk about trauma centers, as I'm not actually in a trauma situation. The flu in a relatively normal, healthy adult shouldn't be much cause for concern. The upside of being sick is that I've had some time to go through emails that gmail has designated as "Everything Else" in my Priority Inbox (is anyone else using this? To any degree of success?). Last week, our VP of R&D's wife sent me an email from her daughter, an RN in Georgia, about trauma centers and funding. There's an amendment on the ballot for a November 2nd election for increasing the car tag fee by $10 to fund trauma centers in Georgia. For those of you in Georgia, spread the word, and make sure you make it to the polls on November 2nd.

In a former life, I did three months of eye-opening research in the trauma center at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta. Grady is something of a joke between most well-to-do Atlanta families (and I use that term very, very loosely) - the ones that live north of I-20. Even the residents at Grady would tell us, if you've had a serious accident come to Grady, and then get out as fast as you can. Due to the large contingent of repeat homeless patients, the trauma team would call the ER "Hotel Grady" - drug addicts, chronically afflicted homeless, and alcoholics would deliberately self-injure to be allowed back into Grady for a warm bed and a meal to eat. The trauma center was constantly put on diversion due to overcrowded wards, and then would still have to accept patients because other trauma centers were on diversion too.

Needless to say, I'm all for the amendment. Check out the details here.

Now for the fun part of the post. I've been laying in bed, reading interesting blog posts, listening to Josh Ritter, and taking poor-quality iPhone photos of the dog. Some particularly memorable shots (if you want to use these pictures, please drop me a line!):

What Sawra thinks about me being sick.

Toy-hoarding. No, you can NOT play with my toys.

Getting a little camera shy. It's so funny to watch her rub her eyes.

Content that she gets to sleep on the bed all day.

Sawra is a 7-and-a-half-month-old Yorkie/Maltese mix, and the cutest thing ever.