new scutmonkey: the 6 stages of overnight call
This may be a slight retread if youfollow me on Twitter, but one particularly bad night on call about a month ago, I posted a poll surveying the worst overnight call phenomena. After that...well, after that it was just a matter of drawing the thing.Here, panel by panel:For those who are curious, I ' ve been meaning to get back into cartooning for a while now (despite the long hiatus I ' ve actually drawn comics...well, basically my whole life, since I was a very small odd child with too few friends and a bit of a defensive sense of humor to match), but as I noted previously, making these comics does take some significant a...
Source: the underwear drawer - June 15, 2018 Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Michelle Au Source Type: blogs
shiny new scutmonkey: patient allergy stratification
I don ' t even remember when the last time it was that I made a new comic (I suspect it was right before I submitted the manuscript for my book to the publisher,* so that would put mein the last few weeks of residency, roughly a lifetime ago), and I don ' t want to make a big thing about this, because the comics...are really pretty stupid. But anyway, here ' s a new one.The comics really do take a lot of work, which is probably why I haven ' t made a new one in just about a decade. There ' s the sketching and the penciling and the inking and the erasing and the scanning and the cleaning up and the titles and cropping....
Source: the underwear drawer - June 7, 2018 Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Michelle Au Source Type: blogs
eraserhead 2.0
Just a quickupdate:I went to my local art supply store today and got this, the Pentel GraphGear 500 with 0.5mm lead. (I deliberately went to the architecture/drafting section of the store, where they had all the weird rulers, figuring here I would be among my people.) It ' s pretty nice. It made suffering through the rest of my Biostats problem set a relative pleasure. (I shouldn ' t overstate things. Ifinished the problem set. Period.) The pencil feels good (despite having a non-padded metal grip), the balance is satisfying, and the eraser and lead are of good quality. I would have preferred a metal body (while ...
Source: the underwear drawer - June 2, 2018 Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Michelle Au Source Type: blogs
eraserhead
I want to talk about mechanical pencils for a second. No, I don ' t have many friends, why do you ask?So I ' m in the market for a new mechanical pencil. I would like to use it for math-ish homework, but also for precision line drawing--not so much shading, so a firm fine-ish point would be better. The platonic ideal I have in mind is a pencil I used ages ago as my primary drawing tool, but I ' ve moved literally 6 times in the past 12 years and I can ' t for the life of me find the one I used to use. (Yes, I ' ve looked. Yes, I only had one.) But here ' s a description. It was a metal-bodied mechanical pencil, which likel...
Source: the underwear drawer - June 1, 2018 Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Michelle Au Source Type: blogs
one flew over
So we had this bird nest in our garage. Our nanny first noticed it a few weeks ago, high up on a shelf something like eight, nine feet up, propped on a shelf against a corner, atop of a pack of Costco bulk terry cloth towels. We ' ve had a broken window in the garage for...I don ' t know, probably going on a year now (don ' t judge), and I suppose it was only natural that at some point, a bird might find its way indoors and make itself at home." Whatkind of bird? " a few people at work asked me when I brought it up, but I couldn ' t really say, since I never actually saw anyonein the nest. For all I knew, the nest could ha...
Source: the underwear drawer - May 29, 2018 Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Michelle Au Source Type: blogs
vintage scutmonkey: psych
OK, I think this is the last of this throwback series. It also happens to be the first " Scutmonkey " comic I wrote (even before" The Twelve Types of Med Students, " even*), and I finished it about a month before I graduated from med school. It seems that the Wayback Machine doesn ' t archive every last image in a deep side branch of your main blog, which is why half the panels are kind of greyscale and janky (photos of a photocopy, you know). But hopefully it ' s all still legible.Two small points. One is that I think it ' s not necessarily the kind of topic I ' d write about so freely now, because, you know, mental healt...
Source: the underwear drawer - May 24, 2018 Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Michelle Au Source Type: blogs
vintage scutmonkey: doctor id
This is a rare bird indeed, in that it is the one Scutmonkey comic that I never disseminated widely. I in fact never completed this strip. This string of panels originally ran with the tag line," To Be Continued... "but I never followed it up, because...I don ' t know. I think it just never felt very funny to me. Don ' t get me wrong, for someone who has worked in the Peds ER, there is a decent dose of acerbic humor in there, but on the whole, when taken with the other comics I wrote, it felt...kind of darkly bitter. A little too much dark, and a little too much bitter.In retrospect--and I don ' t think I needed that much ...
Source: the underwear drawer - May 21, 2018 Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Michelle Au Source Type: blogs
vintage scutmonkey: OB-Gyn
Belatedly in honor of Mother ' s Day and peri-maternal services (cervixes?), another visit in the wayback machine. Happy Tuesday, and may all your splash-proof booties be knee-high. (Source: the underwear drawer)
Source: the underwear drawer - May 15, 2018 Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Michelle Au Source Type: blogs
vintage scutmonkey: surgery
So starting in 2000, and for more than a decade thereafter, I used to have part of my blog hosted on a platform called Homestead. (The f., you say? Shut up, it was the early 2000s, we didn ' t have nice things back then.) Homestead was clunky and hard to navigate and ugly as sin, and they also charged me upwards of $400 a year in annual hosting fees. As aresident I paid this. I mean, my God. Every July they wouldextort me remind me to cough up this renewal fee, and every July I would put off the payment as late as possible until they threatened to wipe all my data, at which point I ' d pay and they ' d keep my files online...
Source: the underwear drawer - May 12, 2018 Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Michelle Au Source Type: blogs
a dog's life
Cooper, New York City, 20071.Thursday morning, I woke up, got my kids ready and took them to school. I came home, tidied up the rest of the dishes, and gave my dog Cooper an indulgent breakfast: a full can of her favorite soft dog food —not just a quarter of a can mixed in with her dry food like usual, but the whole thing, every last bit, all to herself. After she finished, I carried her to my car. We drove to the vet, where a kind receptionist showed me into an exam room, past a potted ficus plant and a cheerful wooden sign rea ding, “Think PAWS-ITIVELY!” I sat down on a bench. Cooper stuck her head behind my knees....
Source: the underwear drawer - April 29, 2018 Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Michelle Au Source Type: blogs
young girls have picked them every one
Despite the fact that it ' s eighty skrillion degrees outdoors in the sun, it ' s officially Fall, which (at least around here) is the season for a particular brand of autumnal barnyard revels. Most of these places are pretty much the same. There are pumpkins, usually some variant of bounce apparatus, listless animals to pet, perhaps some sort of giant PVC tube slide done on the cheap, a corn maze, hayrides, a train ride where the train cars are inexplicably spotted like a Holstein cow 50% of the time, and perhaps cider with donuts. Standard.That ' s not that interesting, because we ' ve all been there, done that. But toda...
Source: the underwear drawer - September 23, 2017 Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Michelle Au Source Type: blogs
back in the saddle again
So here ' s the thing about going back to school when you really haven ' t been in the classroom for the past...oh, let ' s say 16 years. (I am lopping off the last two years of med school in this calculation, since that was really more clinical than didactic, and really more indentured servitude than clinical.)First of all, I can ' t remember the last time I ' ve had to sit still for as long as I was in class over the course of the last weekend. And I ' mold! Sitting still should be my default state at this point, and as I get older I expect I ' ll get increasingly horizontal until finally, I ' m dead. (Meanwhile, also be...
Source: the underwear drawer - September 20, 2017 Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Michelle Au Source Type: blogs
high water mark
Hurricane Irma hasn ' t arrive in our area yet, but somehow she ' s already caused some flooding here.(We were trying to fill our bathtub with clean water in case anything came up, but then we lost track of how full the bathtub was getting and it overflowed. This reminds me of when we ' re starting a case in the OR, make a hash of the A-line or central line or what have you, and dryly note, " Anesthesia EBL: 10 mL. " We caused the very problem we were trying to avoid.)So, Hurricane Irma ' s set to arrive here tomorrow. Our friends to the south obviously have itmuch worse than us, so it feels insulting to even tangentially ...
Source: the underwear drawer - September 10, 2017 Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Michelle Au Source Type: blogs
the cider house RULES!
...is a joke that has surely never been made before!(Sorry John Irving. Maybe if your books weren ' t so f.ing depressing people wouldn ' t need to make jokes about them to laugh through the pain. A Prayer for Owen Meany? More like A Prayer for Owen SADDIE, am I right?)(I ' ll...show myself out.)Anyway. Where was I? Oh right. Today we went apple picking, because it ' s fall and the weather is beautiful and there ' s no way you would know that Hurricaine Irma will be up in our zone by the day after tomorrow. (Though hopefully just a tropical storm by then. Floridian friends, stay safe.) My kids like to pick things (noses, f...
Source: the underwear drawer - September 9, 2017 Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Michelle Au Source Type: blogs
office space
That face when you realize that instead of havingone written assignment due for your Healthcare Management class on Thursday, you actually havethree written assignments due.Where do you find a place to do work? I ' ve always had trouble really getting work done at home.Always. It ' s not a matter of not having enough space. I have space.Physical space, I mean. We even have a room designated as an " office, " though in recent years there has been some creep as one kid or two have gradually taken over my desk to use my computer for this that or the other thing. But it doesn ' t even really matter--even with the separate room...
Source: the underwear drawer - September 8, 2017 Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Michelle Au Source Type: blogs
