The laws of Nature have been temporarily suspended. Please do not adjust your set.

It snowed yesterday.

March in central Texas is not a time when you'd expect snow, but sure enough, there it was. As I passed through the little nothing towns betweeen work and home, the snow fell harder and thicker and wetter, making for a bad case of CSS (Can't See Shit).

Max was outside when I got home. He hates rain and goes all Sarah Bernhardt on me when it thunders ("I can has snuggles? KTHNX.") but loves the snow. He was zipping (well, as much as a 100+-pound dog can zip) around the yard, making like a snowplow with his schnozz. If it hadn't been so dark, I would've gotten a picture.

In other news, I can hurt myself creatively. I know this will come as no surprise to those of you who are regular readers.

I fell the other day at work. I mean dropped to the floor without warning, without the chance to even *try* to catch myself, without even the barest hint of grace. 

It was a clean, non-slippery floor. I found the one thing within sixty square feet that would've caused me to fall over, and promptly stepped on it. And fell over. Like a short tree made out of sandbags, I toppled.

If the bruise on my leg weren't enough, I now have a nasty sneezy head cold. I don't feel bad, exactly; just disinclined to move fast. I'm sneezing, did I mention? And did you know that it is entirely possible--I have just proved this to myself--to bruise your own soft palate by sneezing convulsively several times in a row? I think I might've bruised my right tonsil as well, strange as that sounds. It didn't hurt, I sneezed a bunch, and now it hurts.

Then there's the bruise on my shoulder. I got that one in an interesting way, by lifting a patient who can't use her legs. We'd tried to get her back to bed with a two-person lift, but whatever bizarre thing she has going on in her brain (not my patient, so I don't know details) has taken both her legs and her sense of balance, so the two-person lift was a no-go. She swayed and buckled and the gait belt wasn't doing the job. Being safety-minded, I did a squat-lift to pivot her from her chair to the bed.

I didn't realize that her neck was as weak as her legs. Her forehead hit my left shoulder with an audible thud. Now I have a nice egg-shaped-and-sized bruise there, right above my collarbone. The patient is fine.

Finally, this news flash: Some Doctors Can Be Assholes. 

I don't know what it is about this particular guy, but every time I deal with him, things go from being normal to being a total clusterfuck in about five seconds. I'm not the only one with this problem, so I figure if the only common denominator is him, it's him. We'd had a run-in about a year ago involving his inability to follow directions in order to reach another physician and then being insulting about it, so I was primed.

What he wanted this time was a series of genetic tests so obscure that it took our lab manager the better part of a day just to figure out where to send the blood. I mean, when *Mayo* doesn't do a test, you know you're looking at something weird. Specialty Lab Of Fredsville faxed us the proper requisition, which contained lots of numbers and capital letters in strings next to check boxes somebody was supposed to tick off. The resident didn't know what to make of it, and I was totally flummoxed, never having heard of the genetic condition the attending wanted to test for, let alone the test for it.

So, when Attending With An Attitude showed up on the floor, I (waited until he wasn't busy and then) asked him to (pretty please) fill out this form so I could send it to Specialty Lab.

Whereupon he threw up his hands, sighed heavily, and made a comment about nurses being stupid. I stood there like a bump on a lump while he ticked boxes and scribbled his name at the bottom of the requisition, considering whether beating him to death with a chair was something I had the energy for. I decided against assault and battery and for simply ignoring his comment.

And you know what? With inveterate assholes, ignoring their comments is the best way to piss 'em off. He got a few more jabs in before he left the floor, some of them personal and not related to any clinical situation, and I just...pretended not to hear. At all. He was both annoyed and deflated when he left. I don't think we'll have any more trouble from him for a while.

God, that was fun.