Tonight at dinner EPI entertained me with tales of what his daughter did at the hospital today. [She in turn had entertained him with these earlier]. She’s interning, and today it was brain surgery. Evidently they simply slice the scalp open along the hair line and peel the skin back. [“It’s loose – see, if you put your fingertips on it and move them around you can feel it.”] Then they take a saw and saw open the skull [“It’s really cool – as soon as the saw hits the brain it just stops“] and lift up the brain inside [“It’s loose, you can just lift it”] and apparently it moves, too [“With the guy’s breathing”]. Then the blood clot or whatever it was is removed [“clips put on veins on each side”] and then the whole caboodle is re-assembled and closed [“and 20 minutes later the guy wakes up and asks ‘Hey, how’d it go?'”].

“Also when the brain swells up, it can be damaged if it is contained by the skull. So they just take the saw and saw the skull open like they’re giving a bowl cut and lift the top of the head off. Then the brain swells and when it’s shrunk together again they just replace the top of the head and everything’s cool.”

Such was our lurrvely conversation at dinner this evening. Except that EPI had finished – he can’t bear hearing anything even remotely gross at dinner, whereas YT can watch an entire episode of ER while maintaining a robust appetite [Which reminds me a new season of ER starts tomorrow, whoo-hoo!] so was not fazed at all.

AS FOR THE WEATHER PROPER
Winter’s here. I swear. Today we had hail! and it’s only September. Plus for the second time in a week, Mt. Esja was covered in white – almost all the way down this time, not just the tops. [It looked beautiful.] And even though it is all the way across the bay, this morning the city smelled like snow. It has a smell, you know. That first snowfall. Went to a meeting at AAH’s school and it got pretty cold on the way back – still wearing my jeans coat, can’t bring myself to get out the down jacket just yet. It’s only 4°C at the moment [39.2°F] and daybreak was at 06.17, nightfall at 20.23. [And here I could have blogged about the Baugur case which – medical stories be damned – is by far the most exciting thing that happened today. But I dare not touch that one with a stick, because it is too outrageous and overwhelming and freaky and proves definitively once and for all that life is FAR stranger than fiction.]