Eating Seal (and also working)

I promised it before, but you might have thought that I was lying. I did actually eat seal meat today. The guy who was living in the apartment until today bought several pounds of seal meat (it was on sale!) and then realized he couldn't eat all (or any) of it before leaving. He spent last night cooking up a seal stew, the smell of which was exactly what you'd expect. The upshot is that he left behind an entire large pot of seal stew, part of which I shared with my new apartment-mate for dinner tonight. It looks and tastes pretty much like liver - if liver is filled with small bone chips and is as tough as hide. Also, imagine that liver had less taste. Right now I'm in need of a toothpick.

Also, I went to work today. I showed up at 8:30 and there was definitely nobody expecting me. Well, nobody expecting me in the sense that there was nobody expecting to orient me or help me or anything. People clearly expected me there for work because my inbox was filled with pending consults and lab results. I spent the morning figuring out how to track down charts so that I could make sense of lab results with no clinical information attached and then learning how to triage my own consults. In the afternoon I finally got some orientation and now I'm ready to attack. I have 4 new consults lined up for tomorrow ranging from workup of a seizure to what appears to be a bronchiolitis follow up (hard to tell for sure without the referral sheet though).

Tonight there is a woman in labour with meconium-stained fluid. I expect that I'll be called in during the middle of the night. For the uninitiated, meconium is the first stool a baby produces. When it's in the amniotic fluid, it means that the baby pooed before delivery. This is bad because it is often a sign of distress. It's also bad because "breathing" in the meconium can be damaging to the baby's lungs. There may not necessarily be a problem but I will have to be around to possibly aspirate the meconium from the baby's trachea - something I have never done without a respiratory therapist around before. So...

On a less serious but just as gross note, here is a picture of my bowl of seal stew. I still have to get back to writing about my first day in the subarctic but for now I'm going to do a fetus a favor and review some neonatal resuscitation literature.