Spread some holiday cheer. Don't shoot anyone!

15% off spongebob scrubs with promo code "spongebob_sale"

I was told this all summer, but I still can't believe it's really true. All summer we had violent crime victims, mostly GSWs (gunshot wounds) several times a week, sometimes daily. And that was just what came into our ICU; I don't even know the rate for the whole hospital. (At my old hospital, I'm pretty sure if you were shot anywhere we all panicked and you went to the ICU, but at my new workplace, if you're shot in a nonvital manner, you get patched up and go to a regular trauma-medical floor.)

But all the experienced people said the trauma season really slows down in the winter. And it has! I can't get over that. 

Violence in the cold winter Midwest.

People are really out less shooting each other because of the cold. I mean, it kinda makes sense - most people can hardly oblige themselves to shovel their sidewalks. It takes me an hour to get the kids ready to go outside. I can hardly imagine trying to motivate your minion gangbangers to go perpetrate crimes in this weather. But honestly, you wouldn't think drug-addled hoodlums would care so much about it. Doesn't alcohol make you feel warmer?

Lest you think this wasn't written in the holiday spirit, it was: anyone braving the shopping malls at this time of the month should take heart that the hideous stress of last-minute Christmas shopping hasn't driven up our admissions - at least for violent crimes, that is. Make sure you don't slip on the ice and come in with a subdural hematoma.

Merry Christmas!

First MRI Images of Live Birth

Although it's not as cool as x-rays of video game controllers, a hospital in Berlin performed an MRI scan of a live birth.

The exam was done in order to see why labor stalls and why women require c-sections. Of course, we already know that supine labor (pushing a baby out against gravity, on your back with your pelvis up) can stall labor. I would venture a scientific guess that it stalls 55% more often if you're crammed into an MRI machine - even an custom birth scanner.

Source: Daily Mail

I'm curious why every news source has flipped the woman onto her belly. That's her spine and tailbone above the baby there. Conversely, some of the images are oriented vertically. A step in the right direction, perhaps, but I doubt it happened that way! I haven't seen any supine images, which has to be how it really happened.

I'm thinking it won't reveal very much on why labor stalls, if I'm right in my assumption that labor stalls for positional (anti-gravity laboring) and hormonal (stress hormones inhibiting oxytocin, the labor hormone) reasons, as well as poor clinical decision-making like forcing labor (or non-labor) by induction and augmentation.  I'd also think the mechanism of labor, the descent, is probably different when you're laboring in the more upright positions humans have naturally tended to labor in over the millenia. Laying flat on your back with no regard for spinal alignment or pelvis positioning or the weight of gravity does not strike me as an accurate way to do an imaging study of birth.

• The Daily Mail Online: Doctors produce first-ever MRI scan of baby at the moment of birth
• Medgadget: MRI Used to Visualize Live Birth
• The Unnecesarean: Woman Gives Birth in an MRI Machine

X-Rays of video game controllers and other random things

Flickr user Reintji is a radiology technician who apparently has the spare time and the films to take x-ray images of video game controllers, coconuts, beer bottles, telephones, iPods...

You know, I got accepted to radiology tech school and I turned it down to go into nursing.